letter*  on  tfje  <§reat= 
nes&  anb  Simplicity  of 
tfte  Ctrtgttan  Jfattft 


I 


HENRY   CHURCHILL   KING 


GIFT  OF 
Estate  of  Florence  Wain 


"The  possibilities  of  united  prayer 
are  boundless.  There  is  absolutely 
nothing  which  can  prevail  against  it. 
Therefore,  with  a  growing  realization  of 
its  vital,  highly  multiplying,  and 
enduring  influence,  let  all,  who  have  at 
heart  the  deepest  interests  of  the 
Kingdom  of  Christ  among  students*, 
seek  in  every  way  in  their  power,  to 
make  the  observance  of  the  coming 
Universal  day  of  Prayer  for  Students 
a  great  reality.  " 


LETTERS 

ON 

THE  GREATNESS  AND  SIMPLICITY 
OF  THE  CHRISTIAN  FAITH 


LETTERS 

ON    THE 

GREATNESS  AND  SIMPLICITY 
OF  THE  CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

A   REVISED    EDITION    OF   "  LETTERS  TO    SUNDAY-SCHOOL 
HERJ 

BY 

HENRY   CHURCHILL   KING 

PRESIDENT  OF  OBERLIN  COLLEGE 


BOSTON 
THE    PILGRIM    PRESS 

NEW    YORK  —  CHICAGO 


Copyright,  1906 

BY  THE  CONGREGATIONAL  SUNDAY-SCHOOL 
AND  PUBLISHING  SOCIETY 


Kef  rinted  from  The  Pilgrim  Teacher  and 
Sunday  School  Outlook 


THH  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  CAMBRIDGE,  U.  S.  A. 


PREFACE 

THIS  revised  edition  of  these 
"  Letters "  is  issued  under  an- 
other title,  because  it  has  been 
found  that  the  former  title,  "  Let- 
ters to  Sunday-School  Teachers," 
gave  a  wrong  impression  of  the  aim 
of  the  book,  as  a  possible  book  of 
Sunday-school  methods.  The  let- 
ters were  originally  written  for  The 
Pilgrim  Teacher,  to  help  Sunday- 
school  teachers  to  see  for  them- 
selves, and  to  put  to  their  pupils  as 
clearly  and  simply  as  possible,  the 
great  truths  of  the  Christian  faith. 
But  this  aim  in  its  essence  is  one 
that  concerns  all  thoughtful  Chris- 
tians, and  it  has  accordingly  seemed 


M54S80 


PREFACE 


best  in  this  edition  to  eliminate  en- 
tirely any  direct  Sunday-school  refer- 
ence. This  has  involved  very  slight 
changes  in  the  text,  as  the  form  of 
familiar  letters  has  been  intentionally 
retained. 

HENRY  CHURCHILL  KING. 

OBERLIN  COLLEGE,  April,  1909. 


[vi] 


CONTENTS 

LETTER   ONE  PAGE 

SOME  UNDERLYING  PRINCIPLES i 

LETTER  TWO 

THE  SEEMING  UNREALITY  OF  THE  SPIRITUAL 
LIFE 17 

LETTER  THREE 
THE  SIGNIFICANCE  OF  JESUS  CHRIST    ...     35 

LETTER   FOUR 
GOD  MANIFEST  IN  CHRIST 55 

LETTER   FIVE 
MEN  IN  THE  LIGHT  OF  CHRIST      .     .     .     .     67 

LETTER   SIX 
THE  CHRISTIAN  LIFE  AS  A  FRIENDSHIP    .     .     81 

LETTER   SEVEN 

THE  BASIS  IN  THE  DIVINE  FRIENDSHIP    .     .     97 
[vii] 

I 

V 


CONTENTS 


LETTER   EIGHT  PAGK 
THE  CONDITIONS  OF  DEEPENING  ACQUAINT- 
ANCE WITH  GOD in 

LETTER   NINE 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF  DEEPENING  ACQUAINT- 
ANCE WITH  GOD  —  Continued .     .     .     .     127 

LETTER   TEN 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF  DEEPENING  ACQUAINT- 
ANCE WITH  GOD — Continued.     .     .     .     143 

LETTER   ELEVEN 
THE  FUNDAMENTAL  TEMPTATIONS      .     .     .     159 

LETTER   TWELVE 

THE   SUPREME   CLAIMS   OF  THE  CHRISTIAN 
LIFE  UPON  THOUGHTFUL  MEN  .     .     .     .     177 


Vlll 


LETTER   I 
SOME   UNDERLYING   PRINCIPLES 


Letters  on  the 

Greatness  and  Simplicity 

of  the  Christian  Faith 

Letter   One 

SOME  UNDERLYING   PRINCIPLES 

I  WRITE  especially  to  my  younger 
readers ;  and  I  want  in  these  let- 
ters simply  to  try  to  say  to  you 
some  of  those  things  that  I  should 
like  to  say  if  I  could  sit  down  with 
you  individually  and  we  were  to  talk 
frankly  and  earnestly  of  your  deeper 
difficulties,  of  those  questions  which, 
after  all,  actually  concern  us  more 
than  all  else.  I  am  not  to  aim  at  say- 
ing novel  things ;  but  we  are  to  try 
to  find  our  way  together,  as  I  have 

[3] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

repeatedly  said  to  my  own  Sunday 
Bible  Class,  into  clear  and  deep 
and  abiding  convictions  concerning 
the  great  fundamental  Christian 
truths ;  to  see  that  they  are  —  and 
I  do  not  choose  my  words  here  at 
random  —  real,  rational,  vital.  Real 
- — as  real  as  business  and  housework 
and  books  and  music  and  friends 
and  home  ;  rational  —  as  knit  up  in- 
dissolubly  with  your  best  thinking 
in  every  other  sphere ;  vital  —  as 
springing  out  of  your  own  life,  lay- 
ing commands  on  life,  adding  zest 
to  life,  and  giving  great,  undying 
motives  for  life.  You  cannot  finally 
be  satisfied  with  less. 

If  these  great  fundamental  Chris- 
tian truths  come  to  mean  to  you 
what  Christ  intended  they  should 
mean,  they  will  help  you  to  do  the 
two  only  really  great  things  one 
[4] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

man  can  do  for  another :  to  bring 
to  your  associates  the  contagion  of 
a  high  and  noble  life,  and  to  bear 
honest,  effective  testimony  of  your 
own  best  vision  —  that  in  which 
and  by  which  you  most  live.  This 
is  a  large  undertaking ;  and  if  it  is  at 
the  end  in  any  fair  measure  accom- 
plished, you  must  do  even  more  in  the 
matter  than  I.  You  must  do  some 
earnest  thinking ;  and,  even  more 
than  that,  you  must  furnish  that 
deepening  experience,  through  the 
truth  wrought  out,  that  can  alone 
lead  you  still  more  deeply  into  the 
truth.  Simply  to  replace  old  phrases 
by  new  phrases  is  poor  and  futile 
business  enough,  and  not  worth  the 
time  of  either  you  or  me.  And 
this  leads  me  at  once  to  the  first 
of  those  preliminary  things,  those 
underlying  principles,  of  which  I 
[5] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

wanted  to  speak  briefly  in  this  first 
letter. 

i .  No  one  can  simply  hand  over  to 
you  a  ready-made  creed,  however  clear 
and  convincing  his  reasoning,  how- 
ever just  and  comprehensive  his 
view,  because,  in  the  first  place,  if 
your  creed  is  to  be  worth  anything, 
it  must  be  in  truth  what  we  call  it, 
a  confession  of  faith  —  something  in 
which  you  can  honestly  express  your 
own  belief;  something  that  grows  in 
some  vital  way  out  of  your  own  ex- 
perience ;  in  a  word,  a  true  putting 
of  real  convictions.  Now  convic- 
tions cannot  be  handed  over  from 
man  to  man.  No  man  can  ever  be 
sure  of  absolutely  transferring  his 
full  thought,  even,  to  another  mind  ; 
still  less  can  convictions  be  so  easily 
handed  over.  The  most  I  can  pos- 
sibly do  for  any  of  you  is  simply  to 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

tell  you  honestly  the  truths  that 
mean  most  to  me,  the  surpassing 
significance  that  Christ  seems  to  me 
to  have,  and  how  these  deepest 
things  best  come  home  to  me. 
The  rest  is  for  you  and  God.  If  by 
time  and  thought  and  attention  and 
personal  commitment  you  give  God 
opportunity  with  you  through  the 
truth  and  through  his  supreme  reve- 
lation in  Christ,  the  certainty  of 
God  and  the  truth  of  God  shall  be 
wrought  in  you.  So  and  only  so 
can  come  real  convictions.  It  is 
serious  business,  therefore,  upon 
which  we  enter  together  in  these 
apparently  simple  letters.  The 
great  Christian  convictions  cannot 
be  simply  laid  on  you  like  so  many 
garments,  or  even  so  many  geomet- 
rical proofs  or  scientific  propositions. 
These  spiritual  convictions  are  deeply 

[7] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

connected  with  your  inner  spirit  and 
life,  and  they  involve  your  personal 
relation  to  God.  We  greatly  de- 
grade Christian  doctrine  when  we 
regard  it  as  simply  a  series  of  more 
or  less  provable  propositions.  Your 
real  inner  creed  is  a  vital  growth 
out  of  your  personal  experience. 

2.  You  cannot  come  in  any  way  into 
any  deep  convictions  of  the  truth  all  at 
once.  This  is  not  at  all  to  say  that 
there  may  not  be  significant  crises 
in  your  lives.  I  could  even  hope 
that  some  of  these  letters  might 
bring  such  a  significant  crisis  for 
some  of  you.  But  even  our  deepest 
and  most  striking  experiences  have 
been  long  preparing,  and  their  full 
significance  comes  out  only  as  we 
try  to  live  by  them.  Mighty  con- 
victions are  no  growth  of  an  hour 
or  a  day  ;  they  root  deep  in  living, 
[8] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

in  the  influence  of  close  personal 
associations,  in  honest  putting  of  the 
truth  into  act.  You  will  not  there- 
fore expect  in  this  most  difficult 
sphere  of  moral  and  spiritual  con- 
victions, that  you  can  make  some 
happy  leap  that  shall  land  you  at 
once  in  the  center  of  all  truth.  We 
are  coming  to  believe  that  no  truth, 
of  whatever  kind,  gets  real  hold  of 
us  so.  Even  mathematical  truths 
we  need  to  work  out  in  multiplied 
problems ;  and  for  appreciation  of 
scientific  truth  we  require  the  work 
in  the  laboratory.  How  much  more 
must  the  appreciation  of  these  vital 
truths  come  out  only  as  they  are  put 
into  act !  The  creed  that  is  to  be 
deeply  yours,  you  must  have  lived  out, 
not  merely  thought  out.  The  full 
significance,  therefore,  of  some  of 
the  things  I  shall  say  may  come  to 
[9]  ' 


GREATNESS  AND  SIMPLICITY 

you  only  after  the  months  and  years 
have  given  you  the  vital  experience 
that  unlocks  for  you  the  inner  secrets 
of  the  truth.  It  is  one  of  the  joys 
of  living,  that  one  may  look  forward 
to  ever-deepening  vision  of  the  truth 
through  simple,  honest  living.  "  If 
any  man  willeth  to  do  his  will,  he 
shall  know  of  the  teaching."  And 
you  are  seeking  truth,  not  simply  for 
yourselves,  but  for  the  sake  of  others, 
so  that  you  need  to  see  that  — 

3.  No  one  can  witness  in  the  moral 
and  spiritual  realm  with  greatest  ef- 
fectiveness to  that  which  he  does  not 
himself  believe  with  depth  of  conviction. 
You  cannot  kindle  another  by  rote. 
That  which  does  not  greatly  move 
you  will  scarcely  greatly  move  an- 
other through  you.  This  simply 
means  that  our  effective  witness  is 
necessarily  confined  to  what  is  vitally 

[10] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

real  to  us  —  to  our  real  inner  creed. 
For  just  this  reason  "complete  and 
systematic"  presentation  of  religious 
subjects  often  contains  much  that  is 
mere  filling.  Only  those  parts  have 
any  kindling  power  that  have  the 
fire  of  personal  conviction  in  them. 
We  must  learn,  as  witnesses,  not  to 
be  afraid  of  even  very  fragmentary 
statements,  if  that  is  all  we  can  make 
real.  Even  fragments  that  are  real 
are  better  than  masses  that  are  un- 
real ;  but  we  want  the  fullest  reality 
possible.  For  the  very  sake,  there- 
fore, of  both  the  breadth  and  the  ef- 
fectiveness of  one's  witness,  one  must 
seek  to  deepen  and  to  extend  his  con- 
victions ;  for  there  is  no  cheap  way 
to  become  a  good  witness  to  spiritual 
things.  The  ultimate  aim,  then,  of 
this  effort  we  are  to  make  together 
is  absolutely  vital  to  any  true  success 


GREATNESS   AND  SIMPLICITY 

in  the  high  work  of  the  disciple 
of  Christ.  I  am  to  try,  with 
your  own  cooperation,  to  help  you 
to  real  convictions  at  some  points 
where  perhaps  now  you  have  none, 
and  to  enlarge  and  to  deepen  the 
convictions  .that  are  already  yours. 
If  even  in  small  degree  this  could 
be  done,  it  would  be  worth  all  our 
united  efforts. 

4.  But  this  does  not  mean  that  we 
are  to  seek  for  each  a  uniform  outcome. 
That  would  be  utterly  impossible  in 
any  case ;  for  even  those  who  thought 
they  perfectly  agreed  with  such 
statements  as  I  shall  make  of  the 
great  Christian  truths  would  quite 
certainly  not  take  them  in  precisely 
the  way  I  meant  them.  But  even 
if  such  absolute  uniformity  of  con- 
viction and  statement  were  possible, 
it  would  still  be  undesirable.  For 

[12] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

we  seek  not  the  unity  of  monoto- 
nous uniformity,  but  the  organic 
unity  that  arises  from  the  truth  of 
each  supplementing  the  truths  of  all 
the  rest.  And,  what  is  more  im- 
portant, the  infinite  truth  of  God 
is  too  large  for  any  single  finite  re- 
flection of  it.  We  approximate  it, 
even,  only  by  bringing  together  the 
varied  individual  reflections.  We 
are  unique  individuals  with  our  own 
peculiar  temperaments  and  special 
adaptations,  to  each  of  whom,  we 
have  the  right  to  believe,  it  is  given 
to  present  a  kind  of  personalized  and 
individual  setting  forth  of  the  great 
truth  of  God  in  Christ,  that  has  its 
own  unique  value,  which  cannot  be 
wholly  replaced  by  any  other.  I 
distinctly,  therefore,  do  not  seek 
to  reproduce  in  you  my  thoughts. 
Each  one  of  you  has  his  own  unique 
[13] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

personality  through  which  God  de- 
sires to  speak  in  the  peculiar  voice 
of  that  personality  ;  each  of  you  is  a 
member  of  the  body  of  Christ,  and 
each  member  has  his  office.  What 
I  hope  for  my  putting  to  you  of 
Christian  truths,  therefore,  is  not 
that  my  thought  may  simply  over- 
ride or  replace  yours,  but  rather  may 
quicken  and  bring  out  your  own 
individual  thinking.  I  could  wish 
that  my  thought  might  be  in  your 
minds  seeds  and  germs  of  truth  that 
in  their  growth  in  your  minds  should 
reflect  the  peculiar  nature  of  the 
mind  in  which  they  are  planted, 
and  so  attain  an  individual  living 
power  of  their  own.  To  some 
extent  this  is  quite  certain  to  be 
the  case ;  and  yet  it  is  worth  while 
to  make  it  clear  to  ourselves  that 
we  seek  nothing  else,  and  that  the 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

mechanical   uniformity  is  not  even 
to  be  desired. 

In  my  next  letter  I  want  to  speak 
of  some  of  the  reasons  why  the 
spiritual  life  often  seems  unreal. 


['5] 


LETTER   II 

THE   SEEMING   UNREALITY   OF 
THE   SPIRITUAL   LIFE 


Letter    Two 

THE  SEEMING   UNREALITY   OF 
THE   SPIRITUAL   LIFE 

T  CAN  hardly  help  asking  you  in 
-*•  this  letter  to  face  with  me  another 
preliminary  question  that  is  of  the 
first  importance,  before  I  go  on  in 
later  letters  to  take  up  singly  the 
great  Christian  truths. 

Why  do  not  the  facts  of  the 
spiritual  world  seem  as  real  to  us 
as  the  facts  of  the  material  world  ? 
Why  is  the  fact  of  such  a  God  as 
Christ  reveals,  and  of  our  relations 
to  him,  not  as  indubitable,  for  ex- 
ample, as  the  existence  of  other 
persons  and  our  relations  to  them  ? 
In  a  word,  why  does  the  spiritual 
life  often  seem  so  unreal  ?  Why  is 
[19] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

the  conviction  of  it  a  wavering  one, 
with  its  constant  ups  and  downs  ? 
These  are  questions  that  press  upon 
us  from  the  start  in  every  thorough- 
going discussion  of  the  reality  of  a 
spiritual  view  and  of  a  spiritual  life. 
Can  something  be  done  now  to 
meet  this  constant  difficulty  of  the 
seeming  unreality  of  the  spiritual 
life  ?  Can  we  see  the  reason  for 
this  seeming  unreality  ? 

I  have  space  to  speak  of  only 
three  causes,  and  of  these  most 
briefly.  I  must  ask  you  to  think 
further  than  I  say.  These  three 
causes  are  :  mistaken  conceptions  of 
the  character  of  the  spiritual  life 
itself;  the  inevitable  fluctuations 
of  our  natures  ;  and  the  intended 
obscurity  required  for  our  moral 
training. 

I.  As  to  mistaken  conceptions.     We 

[20] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

begin  with  the  misconceptions  which 
arise  from  mistaking  the  nature  of 
the  spiritual  life  itself,  as  a  life  of 
strain,  or  a  life  of  imitation  or  repe- 
tition of  others'  experiences,  or  a 
life  of  magical  inheritance,  or,  fi- 
nally, a  life  of  rules  laid  on  from 
without. 

i.  First,  the  spiritual  life  is  not 
a  life  of  strain,  either  in  the  sense 
of  putting  pressure  upon  the  mind 
to  hold  certain  beliefs,  or  in  the 
sense  of  keeping  a  certain  con- 
tinuous stress  of  attention.  It  is  a 
real  struggle,  a  continuing  conflict, 
a  life  of  steady  facing  of  duty  ;  but 
still  it  should  not  be,  in  any  hyster- 
ical sense,  a  life  of  strain. 

This  means,  in  the  first  place, 
that  the  man  who  wishes  to  have 
the  spiritual  life  a  reality  to  him 
will  not  bring  any  pressure  upon  his 

[21] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

mind  to  hold  certain  beliefs.  He 
will  rather  see  clearly  that  his  sole 
responsibility  is  simply  to  put  him- 
self face  to  face  with  the  great 
realities,  and  to  make  an  honest  re- 
sponse to  them.  Nor,  in  the  second 
place,  does  the  spiritual  life  call  for 
the  keeping  up  of  a  certain  stress 
of  feeling  or  of  attention.  There  is 
need  of  clear  discrimination  at  this 
point.  The  spiritual  life  does  look, 
of  course,  to  a  persistent,  dominant 
purpose  of  righteousness,  a  real  sur- 
render of  the  will  to  God ;  but  this 
does  not  and  cannot  mean  the  un- 
changed continuance  of  some  par- 
ticular thought  or  object  fixed  in 
the  attention,  or  the  steady  main- 
tenance of  some  special  state  of 
feeling. 

2.    It  is  equally  important  for  us 
to  remember,  if  the  spiritual  life  is 
[22] 


OP  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

to  be  real  to  us,  that  the  spiritual  life 
is  not  a  life  of  the  imitation  or  repeti- 
tion of  the  experiences  of  others.  That 
we  need  others  here,  as  elsewhere, 
is  clear.  That  we  come  into  most 
that  is  of  value  to  us  through  intro- 
duction by  some  other,  is  also  plain. 
Nevertheless,  if  the  spiritual  world 
is  to  have  the  fullest  reality  for 
us,  the  reality  it  ought  to  have  for 
a  mind  awakened  to  mature  self- 
consciousness,  we  must  have  some 
experience  in  the  spiritual  that  is 
genuinely  our  own,  not  a  hollow 
echo  of  something  we  have  heard 
from  others.  This  is  not  easy. 
Men  naturally  shrink  from  it.  It  is 
far  easier  to  satisfy  oneself  with  a 
very  shallow  dealing  with  the  prob- 
lem of  our  life,  and  then  to  catch  up 
the  traditional  language  of  religious 
experience  from  others. 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

3.  Again,  the  spiritual  life  is  not  a 
life  of  magical  inheritance  of  results. 
If  the  results  in  the  spiritual  life  are 
conceived   as  coming  without  clear 
conditions,  in  a  kind  of  merely  mag- 
ical way,  that  life  unavoidably  takes 
on  for  most   men  to-day  a  decided 
aspect  of  unreality.      It  has  no  intel- 
ligible connection  with  the  rest  of 
their    life,   and    there    seems    to   be 
nothing  they  can  do  with  it.      This 
simply  means  that   we  must  recog- 
nize  fully  that  there   are  laws   and 
conditions  in  the  spiritual  world. 

4.  On  the  other  hand,  the  spirit- 
ual life  is  not  a  life  of  rules  laid  on 

from  without.  Counsels  to  be  heeded 
there  certainly  are  in  the  religious 
life,  and  valuable  habits  to  be 
formed.  Nevertheless,  the  heart 
of  the  life  with  God  can  never  be 
contained  in  any  prescribed  routine 
[24] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

of  rules  and  regulations.  We  are 
called  to  a  real  life,  with  its  own 
spontaneous  growth  and  varied  ex- 
pressions, and  we  are  called  to 
liberty.  Christ  seems  to  have  been 
concerned  not  to  give  rules  for  holy 
living  or  for  holy  dying,  but  to  trust 
all  to  the  dynamic  of  the  single  mo- 
tive of  love  to  his  person.  His  dis- 
ciples are  simply  asked  to  be  in  truth 
disciples,  doing  only  what  loving 
loyalty  to  him  would  suggest. 

II.  But  the  sense  of  unreality 
passes  over  upon  the  spiritual  life 
not  only  because  of  mistaken  con- 
ceptions of  it,  but  also  because 
of  the  inevitable  fluctuations  of  our 
natures. 

i .  With  all  possible  care  of  bod- 
ily conditions  we  cannot  preserve 
an  unvarying  state  of  body;  and 
changing  bodily  conditions  tinge  in- 
[25] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

evitably  our  mental  states.  So,  too, 
the  psychical  conditions  are  constantly 
changing.  And  with  this  constant 
change,  however  produced,  we  have 
always  to  reckon.  That  nothing  in 
life  should  seem  always  the  same  to 
us,  is  the  inevitable  result.  We  are 
to  expect,  therefore,  from  both 
physical  and  psychical  conditions, 
changing  vital  feelings,  alternation 
of  moods,  altering  power  of  atten- 
tion, and  some  consequent  ebb  and 
flow  in  conviction  and  in  the  sense 
of  reality.  We  are  creatures  of 
moods.  So  long  as  feeling  enters 
necessarily  so  much  into  our  sense 
of  the  reality  of  all  things,  the 
things  of  the  spirit  especially,  which 
do  not  force  themselves  upon  us, 
will  vary  for  us  in  their  clearness 
and  reality. 

2.    But  in  all  this,  let  it  be  ob- 
[26] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

served,  we  have  nothing  that  is  pecu- 
liar to  the  religious  life.  It  holds  for 
all  spheres  of  value,  and,  indeed,  in 
every  sphere  of  life  where  feeling 
enters  at  all.  This  really  implies 
that  wherever  we  are  not  living  a 
merely  fragmentary  life,  this  ebb 
and  tide  must  be  reckoned  with  ;  it 
is  involved  in  our  very  natures  as 
finite  and  feeling  beings.  More- 
over, the  life  of  the  rejection  of  all 
ideals  and  the  life  of  unbelief  have 
their  fluctuations,  too.  It  is  not 
merely  the  conviction  of  the  highest 
which  varies.  The  lower  life,  too, 
has  its  inevitable  misgivings.  We 
are  creatures  of  two  worlds  —  an 
animal  and  a  spiritual ;  and  both 
make  themselves  felt  in  some  de- 
gree. Unbelief  has  its  questionings 
as  well  as  belief.  We  may  not 
choose  whether  our  feeling  shall 
[27] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

vary  or  not.      We  can  only  choose 
the  dominant  moods. 

3.  This  leads  us  to  emphasize 
the  important  principle  that  when 
we  find  fluctuations  in  our  convic- 
tions concerning  the  reality  of  any- 
thing, we  must  ask  for  the  witness  of 
our  consciously  best  hours,  physically, 
intellectually,  and  morally.  If  re- 
ligious conviction  does  tend  to  go 
up  and  down  with  our  moral  atti- 
tude, and  the  ethical  has  any  real 
justification,  then  our  religious  con- 
victions are  just  so  far  confirmed. 
And  with  reference  to  the  entire 
man,  it  behooves  us  to  ask,  When 
does  the  spiritual  world  seem  most 
real  to  us  ?  in  our  best  or  our  worst 
moments  ?  when  we  are  consciously 
most  in  possession  of  ourselves  in 
every  way,  or  when  we  are  con- 
sciously below  our  best  ?  So  Tyn- 
[28] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

dall,  for  example,  tested  the  doc- 
trine of  material  atheism  :  "  I  have 
noticed/'  he  said,  "during  years  of 
self-observation,  that  it  is  not  in  the 
hours  of  clearness  and  vigor  that 
this  doctrine  commends  itself  to  my 
mind/'  We  need,  thus,  constantly 
to  take  account  of  our  necessary 
finite  limitations  and  the  inevitable 
fluctuations  of  our  life,  if  we  are  to 
keep  our  religious  faith  clear  and 
strong. 

The  very  fact  that  these  causes 
of  the  sense  of  the  unreality  of  the 
spiritual  life  are  to  be  found  in  our 
natural  constitution  suggests  that  it 
may  not  be  intended  that  the  spir- 
itual life  should  always  seem  to  us 
real  and  commanding.  And  if  we 
press  the  inquiry,  Why  should  this 
be  intended  ?  it  seems  possible  to 
suggest  but  one  answer  consonant 
[29] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

with  a  genuine  religious  faith :  it 
must  be  needed  as  a  part  of  our 
moral  training.  We  are  brought, 
thus,  to  consider  the  last  of  the 
causes  of  the  seeming  unreality  of 
the  spiritual  life. 

III.  The  seeming  unreality  is  a  part 
of  our  moral  training.  For  the  sake, 
then,  of  our  moral  training,  for 
the  sake  of  deepening  the  spiritual 
life  itself,  into  which  the  moral 
is  so  inextricably  woven,  there  is  a 
purposed  seeming  unreality  in  spirit- 
ual things.  If  there  is  a  God  at  all 
who  really  means  to  bring  us  into 
the  highest  life,  we  may  confidently 
expect  that  the  conditions  of  our  life 
will  be  so  shaped  as  to  call  out  in  us 
the  persistent  ethical  will. 

i .  Above  all  else,  this  means  that 
the  conditions  must  be  such  that  the 
religious  life  must  be  a  man's  own, 
[30] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

voluntarily  chosen  and  voluntarily 
kept.  If  this  is  to  be  true,  a  sacred 
reverence  for  the  human  personality 
must  be  a  controlling  principle  in  all 
God's  dealing  with  us.  This  implies 
that,  in  the  nature  of  the  case,  it  is 
impossible  that  there  should  be  any 
forcing  of  God  and  the  spiritual  life 
upon  a  man. 

2.  And  if  there  is  to  be  no  forc- 
ing of  God  and  the  spiritual  world 
upon  a  man,  this  would  mean,  fur- 
ther, that  we  can  expect  no  absolutely 
incontrovertible    evidences,    no     over- 
powering signs.      A   choice  will  be 
left,  some  room  for  our   own  atti- 
tude of  will  to  have  its  effect. 

3.  But  even  more  than  this  is  to 
be    said.      Our    moral    need    seems 
plainly  to   require,  also,  that   there 
shall  be  no  domination  of  the  human 
personality  by  God's  personality.     Not 

[3'J 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 


only  will  God  not  thrust  the  fact  of 
his  existence  upon  us  in  resistless 
fashion,  but  in  his  personal  relation 
to  us,  even  after  we  have  voluntarily 
and  gladly  recognized  it,  he  will  still 
sacredly  respect  our  own  moral  in- 
itiative and  our  own  individuality. 
The  very  possibility  of  unmistakaoly 
genuine  character  in  finite  beings 
seems  to  depend  upon  the  fact  that 
God  should  thus,  in  at  least  the  pre- 
liminary stages  of  their  training, 
scrupulously  remain  the  indemon- 
strable, the  invisible,  the  hidden,  the 
unobtrusive  God,  showing  such  a 
reverence  for  the  personality  of  his 
children  as  men  never  show  for  one 
another.  We  may  expect,  then, 
that  God's  relation  to  us  will  be  an 
unobtrusive  one. 

These,   then,  seem   to  me  to  be 
some  of  the   chief  reasons  for  the 
[32] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

seeming  unreality  of  the  spiritual  life 
that  we  needed  to  consider  if  we 
were  to  have  the  way  cleared  for  a 
positive  putting  of  the  great  Chris- 
tian truths.  I  fear  that  I  have  made 
rather  severe  demands  upon  your 
attention  in  this  letter ;  but  I  trust 
the  considerations  urged  may  be  seen 
to  mean  more  and  more  to  you,  as 
the  years  go  on. 


[33] 


LETTER   III 

THE   SIGNIFICANCE   OF   JESUS 
CHRIST 


Letter    Three 

THE   SIGNIFICANCE    OF   JESUS 
CHRIST 

YOU  count  yourselves,  first  and 
foremost,  disciples  of  Jesus 
Christ,  and  the  supreme  aim  of  your 
Christian  witness  is  to  bring  others 
into  the  same  discipleship.  This 
must  mean,  if  either  your  living  or 
your  witnessing  is  undertaken  with 
full  thoughtfulness,  that  you  call  your- 
selves Christians  and  have  become  wit- 
nesses to  the  Christian  faith  because 
you  believe  that  he  from  whom  you 
take  your  name  is  the  most  significant 
person  of  history.  You  believe  that 
Christ's  life  and  teaching  have  more 
light  than  any  other  fact  of  history  to 
[371 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

throw  upon  God,  upon  man,  upon 
all  the  varied  relations  of  God  and 
man,  and  so  upon  the  practical  prob- 
lem of  daily  living  in  its  deepest 
aspects.  That  is,  you  see  God,  men, 
and  all  of  life  through  Christ. 

The  first  step,  therefore,  toward 
fundamental  Christian  truth  must 
be  some  understanding  of  Christ 
himself.  I  am  to  ask  you,  there- 
fore, to  consider  with  me  in  this 
letter  the  very  basis  of  our  Christian 
faith.  Who  is  Jesus  Christ  ?  What 
does  he  mean  ?  How  does  he  reveal 
God  ?  What  right  have  we  to  give 
him  so  supreme  a  place  in  the  mas- 
tery of  our  thinking  and  living  ? 
And  I  can  only  answer  these  questions 
by  telling  you  what  Jesus  Christ 
seems  to  me  to  mean,  and  so  giving 
you  a  kind  of  personal  confession  of 
my  own  faith  in  him.  In  doing 
[38] 


OP  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

this,  I  can  hardly  avoid  repeating  in 
substance  what  I  have  elsewhere 
said  on  this  most  fundamental  of  all 
Christian  themes.  Each  point  de- 
serves much  more  elaboration  than 
I  can  give  it  in  this  brief  letter.  Try 
to  think  each  out  fully  for  yourselves, 
i.  First,  then,  Christ  seems  to  me 
to  be  the  greatest  in  the  greatest  sphere ', 
that  of  the  moral  and  spiritual.  It  is 
hardly  too  much  to  say  that  this 
place  is  given  him  by  the  common 
consensus  of  all  thoughtful  men  who 
really  know  his  spirit  and  teaching. 
He  sees  the  problem  of  living  more 
broadly  and  more  deeply  than  any 
other.  No  other  has  so  grasped 
the  full  meaning  of  life.  No  other 
shows  such  delicate  skill  in  applying 
moral  and  spiritual  principles.  If 
we  have  anywhere  one  who  may  be 
said  to  speak  with  full  authority  in 

[39] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

the  moral  and  spiritual  world,  that 
person,  assuredly,  is  Jesus  Christ. 

It  is  perhaps  only  to  put  the  same 
thing  in  different  form,  when  one 
says  with  Fairbairn  that  Christ  is 
transcendent  among  founders  of  religion, 
"  and  to  be  transcendent  here  is  to 
be  transcendent  everywhere,  for  re- 
ligion is  the  supreme  factor  in  the 
organizing  and  regulating  of  our 
personal  and  collective  life."  Try 
to  make  clear  to  yourselves  how 
tremendous  and  all-permeating  the 
influence  of  a  founder  of  a  religion 
is.  He  makes  the  very  light  and 
atmosphere  in  which  thousands, 
and  perhaps  millions,'  of  his  fellow 
beings  see  the  whole  of  their  life. 
And  among  these  transcendent  lead- 
ers of  the  race,  Jesus  himself  is 
transcendent.  The  last  forty  years 
have  been  characterized  by  such  a 
[40] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

study  of  the  religions  of  the  world 
as  has  never  been  seen  before.  And 
yet  it  seems  to  me  hardly  open  to 
doubt  that  the  result  of  this  study  is 
not  to  make  the  figure  of  Christ  less, 
but  more  significant.  At  the  most, 
we  can  hardly  do  more  than  bring 
any  other  religious  teacher  into 
comparison  with  Christ  at  certain 
points.  No  religious  founder  will 
bear  comparison  with  him  in  the 
full  scope  of  either  his  life  or  his 
teaching.  _i 

So  really  is  Christ  greatest  in  this 
sphere  of  the  moral  and  spiritual 
that  he  becomes  for  men  truly  a 
kind  of  "  personalized  conscience." 
One  may  well  be  challenged  to  sug- 
gest a  higher  moral  test  for  a  man 
than  that  which  is  afforded  by  the 
spirit  of  Jesus,  as  concretely  shown 
in  his  life  and  teaching. 
[40  ' 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

2.  Jesus  is  also  the  sinless  and  non- 
penitent  one.  No  other,  certainly, 
ever  intelligently  claimed  to  be  sin- 
less ;  for  no  other  has  the  claim  ever 
been  intelligently  made.  The  great 
historian,  von  Ranke,  carries  the 
common  judgment  of  men  with  him 
when  he  says  :  "  More  guiltless  and 
more  powerful,  more  exalted  and 
more  holy,  has  naught  ever  been  on 
earth  than  his  conduct,  his  life,  and 
his  death ;  the  human  race  knows 
nothing  that  could  be  brought,  even 
afar  off,  in  comparison  with  it."  If 
Christ's  unusual  moral  insight  is 
granted  at  all,  if  he  were  not  sinless, 
he  could  neither  make  the  claim  nor 
allow  the  claim  to  be  made.  The 
keener  his  moral  consciousness,  the 
less  likely  was  he  to  make  any  claim 
that  was  not  true.  But  in  one  of 
the  surest  of  all  the  bits  of  autobi- 
[42] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

ography  that  we  have  from  Christ, 
he  tells  the  story  of  his  own  struggle 
with  the  most  fundamental  tempta- 
tions of  his  life  without  the  slightest 
hint  of  moral  failure. 

And  the  claim  of  the  sinlessness 
of  Christ,  it  should  be  noted,  is  not 
made  so  much  because  of  any  special 
statements,  as  because  of  the  fact  of 
what  Dr.  Bushnell  has  called  his 
"impenitent  piety,"  which  seems  to 
lie  upon  the  very  surface  of  the 
records.  There  is  no  indication 
anywhere  that  he  includes  himself 
with  others  in  the  confession  of  sin. 
He  does  not  count  himself  thus  with 
other  men  as  needing  redemption, 
but  as  himself  clearly  able  to  redeem 
them.  And  by  this  fact  of  non- 
penitence  he  is  marked  off  definitely 
from  all  good  men.  In  the  face  of 
it  he  cannot  simply  be  called  the 
[43] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

best  of  good  men.  In  the  case  of 
all  other  good  men,  as  they  go  for- 
ward in  the  life  of  righteousness 
with  growing  ideals,  their  own  con- 
sciousness of  failure  becomes  also 
more  clear.  Let  one  contrast,  for 
example,  the  spirit  of  Jesus  here 
with  that  of  perhaps  the  best  of  all 
his  followers  —  whom  many  seem 
willing  to  make  a  spiritual  author- 
ity side  by  side  with  Christ  —  the 
apostle  Paul.  The  sense  of  sin  and 
of  debt  to  Christ  for  deliverance  from 
sin  are  both  most  marked  in  him,  and 
there  seems  to  be  in  his  latest  letters 
even  an  increasing  sense  of  his  sin  in 
his  early  rejection  of  Christ.  The 
fact  that  Christ  is  "  the  only  religious 
character  that  disowns  repentance  "  is 
justly  to  be  regarded  as  an  absolutely 
unique  phenomenon  among  men  of 
real  moral  consciousness. 
[44] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

3.  With  the  highest  of  all  ideals, 
Christ  consciously  rises  to  that  ideal, 
and  "  compels  us  to  admit  that  he  rises 
to  it."  Christ's  ideal  involves  abso- 
lute trust  in  God,  and  the  spirit  of 
absolute  love  toward  God  and  men. 
And  it  is  to  the  full  measure  of  this 
ideal  that  he  consciously  rises.  It 
would  be  much  that  men  should  be 
compelled  to  admit  that  a  man  rose 
to  the  full  measure  of  any  reasonable 
ideal.  But  that  one  who  sees  more 
clearly  than  any  other  in  the  moral 
and  spiritual  realm,  and  cherishes 
the  highest  ideal  that  it  is  possible 
for  a  man  to  cherish,  should  con- 
sciously rise  to  that  ideal,  and  compel 
us  to  admit  that  he  so  rises  to  it,  is 
a  fact  unparalleled  in  the  history  of 
the  world.  This  is  far  more  than 
mere  sinlessness.  It  bears  witness 
to  a  positiveness  of  moral  achieve- 
[45]  , 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

ment  that  dwarfs  all  other  human 
attainment. 

4.  Jesus  has  such  a  character  that 
we  can  transfer  it  feature  by  feature  to 
God,  without  any  sense  of  blasphemy  and 
without  any  sense  of  lack.  I  am  not 
now  raising  with  you  any  meta- 
physical theory  of  the  person  of 
Christ.  I  only  ask  you  to  notice  that 
the  most  enlightened  nations  of  the 
world  to-day  owe  their  ideal  of  God 
to  Jesus  Christ,  —  not  merely  to 
what  he  said,  but  to  what  he  was. 
The  significant  thing  is  that  there 
has  been  one  among  us  men,  the 
circumstances  of  whose  life  we  in 
large  measure  know,  concerning 
whose  character  we  can  say,  That 
is  what  I  mean  by  the  character  of 
God.  One  may  well  ask  himself 
what  he  could  add  to  the  character 
of  God  in  imagination  which  has  not 

[46] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

already  been  set  forth,  not  merely  in 
the  words  of  Jesus,  but  in  his  actual 
concrete  life.  Fairbairn  is  fully  justi- 
fied in  saying  that  Jesus  is  "  the  first 
being  who  had  realized  for  man  the 
idea  of  the  Divine."  What  language 
can  compass  such  a  fact  as  that  ? 

5.  Jesus  is  consciously  able  to  re- 
deem all  men.  This,  too,  seems  to 
me  to  lie  upon  the  very  face  of  the 
record.  If  there  is  one  thing  that 
we  can  be  sure  of  concerning  the 
religion  of  Jesus,  it  is  that  it  claimed 
to  be  a  religion  of  redemption. 
And  one  is  to  remember  that  it  is 
this  man  who  knew  as  no  other  did 
the  meaning  of  sin  and  of  moral 
conduct,  and  the  meaning  of  sharing 
the  life  of  God,  who  could  believe 
not  only  that  he  himself  was  right 
in  his  relation  to  God,  but  was  able 
to  redeem  all  others  to  God.  The 

[47] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

Gospel  records  certainly  make  it 
clear,  in  the  words  of  another,  that 
"  Jesus  knows  no  more  sacred  task 
than  to  point  men  to  his  own  per- 
son." He  himself  is  the  way  to 
God,  the  very  life  of  God  —  con- 
sciously able  to  redeem  all  men. 

6.  This  seems  to  me  to  mean,  as 
Dr.  Denison  suggests,  that  Jesus  has 
such  God-consciousness  and  such  sense 
of  mission  as  would  topple  any  other 
brain  into  insanity ',  but  only  keeps  him 
sweety  normal,  rational.  It  is  very 
difficult  for  any  of  us  to  get  a  sense 
of  being  especially  necessary  to  the 
kingdom  of  God  without  serious 
danger  of  moral  lapse  in  over- 
weening conceit  or  hysterical  strain. 
And  there  is  no  suffering  that  men 
know  comparable  with  the  suffering 
that,  for  example,  a  father  has  in  the 
sin  and  shame  of  his  son.  A  very 
[48] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

little  of  such  suffering  is  all  that  it 
seems  possible  for  a  man  to  bear. 
But  here  is  one  who  can  believe  as 
to  all  other  men  that  they  best  see 
God  as  they  see  him,  and  that  it  is 
his  to  bear  the  sin  of  all  and  to 
redeem  all.  And  still,  under  this 
immeasurable  God-consciousness  and 
sense  of  mission,  he  can  be  so  sane 
and  normal  and  rational  that  we 
may  contrast  in  these  respects  the 
atmosphere  of  the  Gospels  with  that 
of  even  our  best  religious  books.  In 
the  very  act  of  the  most  stupen- 
dous self-assertion,  he  can  still  de- 
clare himself  to  be  preeminently  the 
meek  and  lowly  one,  and  can  carry 
our  conviction  both  of  his  meek- 
ness and  of  his  power  to  give  rest  to 
all.  For  my  own  part,  I  cannot 
see  that  the  world  offers  anywhere 
a  comparable  phenomenon. 
*  [49] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

7.  Jesus  is  the  only  person  who  can 
call  out  absolute  trust.     And  yet,  if 
we  are  to  have   the  spirit  of  little 
children,    as  Herrmann    says,    "  we 
must  meet  with  a  personal  life  which 
compels  us  to   trust  it  without    re- 
serve."    And  he  is  surely  justified  in 
adding,  "  Only  the  person  of  Jesus 
can    arouse    such    trust     in    a    man 
who  has    awakened  to    moral    self- 
consciousness/'      We  know  no  other 
person  in  history  into  whose  hands 
we  should  feel  that  we  could  safely 
put  ourselves  absolutely  without  re- 
serve.    The  New  Testament    bears 
vivid    witness    to    the    trust     Christ 
called  out,  in  its  glorious   transfor- 
mation of  the   hard  and  forbidding 
words  "  master  "  and  "  slave." 

8.  Jesus  is  the  one  person  of  history 
in  whom   God  certainly  finds  us   and 
we  find  God.     Here,  too,  I  raise  no 

[50] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

question  of  any  metaphysical  theory. 
I  only  say  that  it  seems  to  me  that 
we  have  in  Jesus  a  fact  so  great  that 
we  can  turn  to  it  with  assurance,  as 
able  to  bring  the  conviction  of  the 
existence  and  love  of  God.  As  one 
turns  confidently  to  the  greatest  he 
has  known  in  art  and  literature  and 
music  to  find  again  the  refreshment 
he  has  before  found,  so  the  Christian 
returns  confidently  to  Christ  to  find 
the  indubitable  assurance  of  God. 
"  In  Christ,"  as  another  has  said, 
"  God  turns  to  the  Christian  and 
is  accessible  to  him."  Harnack's 
words  upon  just  this  point  have 
always  seemed  to  me  to  have  a 
note  of  personal  confession  of  faith : 
"  When  God  and  everything  that  is 
sacred  threaten  to  disappear  in  dark- 
ness, or  our  doom  is  pronounced  ; 
when  the  mighty  forces  of  inex- 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

orable  nature  seem  to  overwhelm 
us,  and  the  bounds  of  good  and  evil 
to  dissolve ;  when,  weak  and  weary, 
we  despair  of  finding  God  at  all  in 
this  dismal  world  —  it  is  then  that 
the  personality  of  Christ  may  save 


us/3 


9.  And  all  this  means  that  Jesus 
is  the  ideal  realized.  The  statement 
may  seem  commonplace,  but  the 
fact  is  not.  Speaking  philosophic- 
ally, we  should  have  a  right  to  ex- 
pect the  realized  ideal  only  in  the 
absolute  whole  of  things.  And,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  we  seem  to  find  no 
realized  ideals  in  the  lower  spheres. 
It  is  all  the  more  remarkable,  there- 
fore, that  in  this  highest  sphere  of 
all,  the  sphere  of  the  moral  and 
spiritual,  we  should  seem  to  find  our 
fully  realized  ideal.  Ask  yourselves, 
as  I  have  often  asked  myself,  what 

[52] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

you  would  add  to  Christ  that  is  not 
in  his  life,  or  what  you  would  take 
away  from  Christ  that  would  make 
you  more  sure  that  God  was  in  him, 
spoke  and  wrought  through  him, 
that  he  was  in  very  truth  the  su- 
preme manifestation  of  the  living 
God. 

If  only  a  tithe  of  what  I  have  said 
were  true,  surely  here  in  Christ  is 
the  supreme  fact  in  history,  the  one 
priceless  fact  of  the  world.  We 
may  well  name  ourselves  after  him, 
and  account  him  above  all.  All 
other  values,  of  literature  and  music 
and  art  and  friendship,  go  back 
finally  to  the  riches  of  some  personal 
life.  Here  in  Christ  are  the  un- 
searchable riches  of  the  one  un- 
fathomable life.  The  one  great, 
all-inclusive,  indispensable  need  of 
men,  then,  is  to  know  him ;  and 
[53] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

the  one  supreme  wisdom  is  to  give 
this  greatest  of  all  persons  his  full 
opportunity  with  us.  We  have  no 
need  to  try  to force  our  minds  to  any 
conviction  concerning  him.  We 
have  need  only  to  put  ourselves 
steadfastly,  attentively,  and  obedi- 
ently in  his  presence,  to  let  him 
make  his  own  legitimate  impression, 
—  bring  his  own  conviction. 


[54] 


LETTER   IV 

GOD    MANIFEST   IN   CHRIST 


Letter  Four 

GOD   MANIFEST   IN    CHRIST 

Christ  has  at  all  the  significance 
which  my  last  letter  indicated, 
then  he  is  able  to  put  us  at  once  in 
the  very  midst  of  the  spiritual  world 
and  in  touch  with  God  himself. 
He  becomes  the  master-key  to  all 
our  deepest  moral  and  spiritual  prob- 
lems, and  God  himself  becomes 
manifest  to  us  in  him.  We  find 
God  in  Christ.  And  in  our  search 
for  God  we  have  a  right  to  start  di- 
rectly from  Christ  as  undoubtedly 
the  most  significant  of  the  facts  of 
the  world,  because  the  surest  dis- 
cerner  of  moral  and  spiritual  truth, 
consciously  the  completest  revealer 

[57] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

of  God,  and  carrying  most  decisively 
the  judgment  of  our  own  reason  and 
conscience  at  their  best. 

Even  in  the  matter  of  an  intel- 
lectual argument  for  God,  we  are 
thoroughly  justified  in  starting  im- 
mediately from  the  fact  of  Christ 
himself,  -  -  his  life,  his  teachings, 
and  especially  his  consciousness,  - 
as  the  greatest  and  most  significant 
fact  in  the  world,  and  so  our  best 
proof  of  the  existence  of  God  in  the 
full  Christian  sense.  The  argument 
goes  upon  the  simple  assumption 
that  if  we  are  ever  to  discern  the 
real  nature  of  the  ultimate  world- 
ground,  our  best  light  must  come 
from  the  greatest  and  most  signifi- 
cant facts.  For  myself,  for  the 
reasons  that  I  have  indicated  in  the 
previous  letter,  I  have  no  doubt  that 
Christ  is  the  most  significant  of  all 
[58] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

facts  known  to  us,  and  therefore  the 
best  basis  for  direct  and  decisive 
inference  as  to  the  nature  of  the 
world-ground.  The  argument  does 
not  at  all  go,  it  should  be  noticed, 
upon  any  assumption  of  the  arbitrary 
authority  of  Jesus,  but  simply  upon 
the  significance  of  what  he  is.  Any 
authority  which  we  may  subse- 
quently give  to  him  is  based  wholly 
upon  what  we  have  in  fact  found 
him  to  be.  I  know  no  good  reason, 
therefore,  why  one  should  not  count 
the  fact  of  Christ  as  the  greatest  of 
all  proofs  of  a  completely  satisfying 
God,  -  -  personal,  and  of  inexhaust- 
ible power  and  wisdom  and  love  ; 
the  proof  most  powerful  to  produce 
conviction  in  the  mind  of  a  man 
who  has  come  to  full  moral  self- 
consciousness.  The  great  difficulty 
with  practically  all  the  common 

[59] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

proofs  for  the  existence  of  God  is 
that  they  do  not  bring  us  to  any- 
thing like  God  in  the  full  Christian 
sense  in  which  Christ  reveals  him. 

But  when  we  speak  of  God  as 
manifested  in  Christ,  we  mean  much 
more  than  that  Christ  can  be  taken 
simply  as  the  most  hopeful  datum 
for  a  new  argument  for  the  exist- 
ence and  attributes  of  God.  No 
merely  intellectual  argument  of  any 
kind  can  put  us  into  personal  rela- 
tion with  God,  and  only  this  brings 
a  man  really  into  the  religious 
life. 

If,  therefore,  we  are  to  be  Chris- 
tians in  truth,  we  must  find  in 
Christ  much  more  than  the  begin- 
ning of  an  intellectual  argument  for 
God.  And,  as  we  have  seen,  we 
count  ourselves  first  and  foremost 
his  disciples  because  we  believe  not 
[60] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

only  that  he  is  the  greatest  teacher, 
and  lived  the  most  perfect  life,  but 
because  we  believe  him  a  personality 
so  great  that  one  has  only  to  put 
himself  persistently  in  his  presence 
to  find  God  a  real  and  present  fact, 
a  living  personality  in  vital  touch 
with  our  own  personal  life. 

In  the  deeply  significant  words 
of  another :  "  This  thought,  that 
when  the  historical  Christ  takes 
such  hold  of  us,  we  have  to  do  with 
God  himself — this  thought  is  cer- 
tainly the  most  important  element 
in  the  confession  of  the  Deity  of 
Christ  for  any  one  whom  he  has 
redeemed.  We  do  not  reach  this 
thought  by  way  of  a  logical  conclu- 
sion from  that  which  we  have  ex- 
perienced at  the  hands  of  Christ, 
but  the  experience  itself  is  such  that 
when  we  confess  his  Deity,  we 
[61] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

simply  give  him  his  right  name. 
When  we  understand  his  Person,  we 
grasp  the  expression  God  gives  us 
of  his  feeling  toward  us,  or  God 
himself  as  a  Personal  Spirit  work- 
ing upon  us.  In  Christ  God  turns 
to  the  Christian  and  is  accessible 
to  him."  Luther  expresses  most 
strongly  this  great  Christian  confes- 
sion of  God  manifested  in  Christ : 
"  This  is  the  first  principle  and  most 
excellent  article,  how  Christ  is  in 
the  Father :  that  we  are  able  to 
have  no  doubt  that  whatsoever  that 
man  says  and  does  is  counted  and 
must  be  counted  said  and  done  in 
heaven,  for  all  angels  ;  in  the  world, 
for  all  rulers ;  in  hell,  for  all  devils ; 
in  the  heart,  for  every  evil  con- 
science and  all  secret  thoughts.  For 
if  we  are  certain  of  this :  that  what 
he  thinks,  speaks,  and  wills  the 
[62] 


OP  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

Father  also  wills,  then  I  can  defy 
all  that  may  fight  and  rage  at  me. 
For  here  in  Christ  I  have  the 
Father's  heart  and  will."  And  in 
this  great  confession  of  Christ  men 
may  unite  who  may  differ  widely 
in  metaphysical  theories. 

Jesus,  that  is,  does  much  more 
than  to  teach  us  that  God  is  Father ; 
he  so  reveals  the  very  spirit  and  love 
of  God  in  his  life  that  he  enables 
us  to  believe  that  God  is  Father, 
enables  us  to  trust  ourselves  abso- 
lutely to  his  forgiving  love  and  his 
strengthening  grace,  and  so  brings 
us  into  our  true  position  as  chil- 
dren of  God.  In  Christ,  thus,  in 
his  living  personality,  the  Christian 
finds  God  himself  manifested  as  no- 
where else,  and  finds,  therefore,  for 
himself,  the  way  to  life.  Jesus  has 
become  for  him  in  very  deed  the 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

way  to  God,  the  truth   of  God,  the 
very  life  of  God. 

It  is  not  strange,  then,  that  the 
New  Testament  comes  to  sum  up 
its  great  primitive  confession  in  the 
baptismal  and  benediction  formulas, 
which  affirm  a  God  who  is  in  his 
very  nature  Father,  living  love ; 
who  is  manifested  in  the  living, 
concrete  personality  of  Jesus  Christ, 
our  Lord  and  Master ;  and  who,  in 
loving  care  for  his  individual  chil- 
dren, makes  himself  known  through 
the  great  manifestation  in  Christ  by 
his  Spirit  in  each  individual  heart. 
Christianity  becomes,  thus,  what 
Fairbairn  calls  it,  a  "  priestless 
religion " ;  for  every  disciple  of 
Jesus  has  himself  become,  through 
this  vision  of  the  heart  of  Christ, 
prophet,  priest,  and  king,  —  seer  of 
the  supreme  vision  of  God  himself, 
[64] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

in  direct  communion  with  God,  and 
with  the  promise  of  complete  spirit- 
ual conquest. 

This  is  the  great  goal  of  the 
Christian's  witness  to  Christ,  —  to 
bring  men  really  to  see  God  mani- 
fest in  Christ. 


[65] 


LETTER   V 
MEN   IN   THE   LIGHT   OF   CHRIST 


Letter  Five 

MEN   IN  THE   LIGHT   OF   CHRIST 

IN  our  last  letter  we  saw  that  we 
were  able  to  believe  in  God  as 
Father  because  of  his  supreme  mani- 
festation in  Jesus  Christ,  because  we 
were  able  to  think  of  the  spirit  of 
Christ's  life  as  truly  representing  the 
spirit  of  God,  and  so  could  believe 
that  the  very  life  of  God  was  a  life 
of  self-giving  love.  This  is  the 
revelation  of  God  which  Christ 
gives,  both  in  his  living  and  in  his 
Caching. 

And  Christ  is  plainly  certain  that 

this  life  of  God  must  be  regarded  as 

the  one  source  of  life  and  light  and 

blessing    for    all    men.      God's    life 

[69] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

must  be  the  standard,  therefore,  not 
alone  of  character,  but  also  of  happi- 
ness. And  it  is  into  the  sharing  of 
that  life  of  God  that  Christ  desires 
to  bring  all.  'This  thought  of  God  as 
Father,  as  living,  self-giving  love,  de- 
termines now  all  else  in  the  thought  of 
Christ.  It  determines  not  only  his 
conception  of  God,  but  his  concep- 
tion, also,  of  men,  of  the  world,  of 
life,  and  of  all  the  future.  I  am  to 
ask  you  to  see,  in  this  letter,  what 
this  thought  of  God  as  Father, 
manifested  in  Christ,  means  in  our 
conception  of  men.  How  must  we 
think  of  men  when  we  see  them  in  the 
light  of  Christ? 

Because  Christ  knows  God  as 
Father,  he  inevitably  sees  men  as  the 
children  of  God:  on  the  one  hand,  in 
the  purpose  and  desire  of  God,  akin 
to  God  and  with  unmeasured  possi- 
[70] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

bilities  ;  on  the  other  hand,  so  far  as 
they  are  disobedient  children  of  God, 
Christ  sees  men  in  their  sin  and  deep 
need. 

First,  then,  Christ  cannot  believe 
that  God  is  the  really  loving  Father, 
and  that  his  life  is  the  only  true  life, 
and  not  see  at  once  that  men  can  come 
into  a  significant  life  only  so  far  as  they 
are  able  to  enter  into  God's  own  life  of 
love.  And  it  is  to  this,  Christ  is  sure 
that  God  has  appointed  men.  While, 
then,  we  still  cherish  the  unloving, 
the  unforgiving  spirit,  we  are  irrev- 
ocably shut  out  from  God's  life. 
Even  in  a  great  human  love  of  a 
noble  man,  the  relation  is  inevitably 
hindered  when  we  allow  ourselves 
consciously  to  fall  below  the  spirit 
of  the  nobler  life.  So,  still  more,  in 
our  relation  with  God,  must  the 
harbored  evil  build  a  wall  of  separa- 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

tion.  In  the  purpose  of  God,  there- 
fore, Christ  sees  men  as  really  akin 
to  the  heavenly  Father,  having  a  per- 
sonality like  the  Father's,  and  capa- 
ble, in  their  free  choice,  of  living  in 
loving  personal  relations  with  both 
God  and  men.  Christ  believes  in 
men,  in  the  greatness  conferred  by 
God  upon  them,  and  in  their  divine 
possibilities.  In  the  thought  of 
Christ,  thus,  no  limits  can  be  set  to 
man's  growth  in  knowledge,  in 
power,  in  character,  in  the  ongoing 
of  his  sharing  in  the  life  of  God, 
and  thus  in  his  coming  increasingly 
into  just  such  ethical  and  spiritual 
relations  to  God  as  those  in  which 
Christ  stood. 

And  that  men  are  children  of  God 

means,  further,  to  Christ,  that  every 

man,    though    he    may    be    in    the 

wrong,  is  still  a  child  of  the  heav- 

[72] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

enly  Father,  loved  of  God,  grieved 
over,  longed  for,  sought  out. 

Once  more,  because  God  is  Father, 
and  his  life  of  love  is  the  one  true 
life,  that  men  should  be  children  of 
God  means,  also,  that  they  must  be 
brothers  one  of  another.  If  I  am  to 
love  men,  I  need  to  believe  that  the 
life  of  every  man  is  knit  up  indisso- 
lubly  with  my  own,  that  he  is  like 
me,  and  that  he  is  in  very  truth  a 
child  of  God.  Then  I  cannot  wish 
to  kill  or  hate  or  despise  or  condemn 
him. 

That  men  are  my  brothers  means, 
then,  in  the  first  place,  that  our  lives 
are  indissolubly  knit  up  together.  For, 
to  mention  no  other  consideration, 
for  your  own  life,  according  to 
Christ's  fundamental  principle,  you 
need  most  of  all  to  love.  And  to 
refuse  to  love,  to  refuse  to  pour 
[73] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

out  your  life  into  the  life  of  others, 
is  to  doom  yourself  to  the  dreadful 
loneliness  and  fruitlessness  of  the 
selfish  life.  To  real  enlargement 
of  life  there  is  one  sole  way  — 
through  the  giving  of  ourselves  in 
loving  self-sacrifice  to  others.  He 
who  refuses  to  take  this  way  only 
"  tightens  his  chains  in  struggling  to 
[fl,  £'t'-be  free."  ^>  Orville  Dewey  is  but  fol- 
lowing out  Christ's  own  teaching 
when  he  says :  "  Every  relation  to 
mankind,  of  hate  or  scorn  or  neglect, 
is  full  of  vexation  and  torment. 
There  is  nothing  to  do  with  men 
but  to  love  them  ;  to  contemplate 
their  virtues  with  admiration,  their 
faults  with  pity  and  forbearance,  and 
their  injuries  with  forgiveness.  Task 
all  the  ingenuity  of  your  mind  to 
devise  some  other  thing,  but  you  can 
.never  find  it.  To  hate  your  adver- 
[74] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

sary  will  not  help  you  ;  to  kill  him 
will  not  help  you ;  there  is  nothing 
within  the  compass  of  the  universe 
can  help  you,  but  to  love  him." 

And  that  men  are  our  brothers 
means,  also,  that  whether  we  will  or 
not,  they  are  really  'very  like  us.  We 
may  strive  to  put  them  in  quite 
another  class,  and  yet,  if  we  will  be 
honest,  we  are  constrained  to  admit 
that  they  are,  nevertheless,  in  the 
great  essentials,  just  like  us,  made 
with  the  same  faculties,  the  same 
fundamental  doubleness  of  nature, 
the  same  variableness,  the  same  great 
possibilities,  and  the  same  great  uni- 
versal interests ;  and  these  respects 
which  are  common  to  us  all  are,  after 
all,  greater  than  those  which  divide 
class  from  class. 

This  vision  of  men  as  children  of 
God  even  in  their  disobedience,  and 
[75] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

as  brothers  one  of  another  in  their 
necessary  recognition  of  their  like- 
ness and  of  the  indissoluble  way 
in  which  their  lives  are  knit  to- 
gether, Christ  never  loses.  Because 
he  knows  that  the  only  true  life  is 
the  life  of  the  heavenly  Father, 
which  is  the  life  of  love,  he  must 
believe  that  the  Father  has  made  all 
men  capable  of  this  life,  and  desires 
that  into  it  they  all  should  be 
brought.  Even  in  their  sin  and 
need,  therefore,  Christ  sees  men  still 
as  children  away  from  the  Father's 
house  and  from  his  life  of  love,  and 
therefore  in  darkness,  in  loneliness,  in 
emptiness  and  misery  and  want,  and 
in  sin  against  the  Father's  love. 
For  them  there  can  be  no  way  back 
into  light  and  friendship  and  large- 
ness and  richness  of  life,  and  right- 
eousness, but  the  way  back  to  the 
[76] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

Father's  house,  into  the  sharing  of 
his  own  life  of  love. 

And  Christ  knows  so  fully  the 
inexorableness  of  this  demand  for 
love  as  the  one  source  of  life,  that 
he  knows  that  the  whole  spiritual  life 
is  a  unity,  that  no  part  of  the  life  of 
men  can  go  up  or  down  alone,  that 
it  is  all  of  a  piece,  that  good  or  evil 
cherished  anywhere  tends  to  per- 
meate the  whole.  From  Christ's 
point  of  view,  therefore,  whatever 
the  wrong  another  has  done  me,  still 
suspicion  and  contempt  and  hate  are 
the  very  working  of  death  in  me. 
And  for  my  own  life's  sake,  I  must 
throw  them  off.  On  the  other  hand, 
every  bit  of  true  love  counts. 

It  is,  then,  just  because  Christ  sees 
so  clearly  that  love  is  life  and  hate  is 
death,  that  he  must  insist  so  strenu- 
ously upon  the  most  radical  carrying 

[77] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

through  of  the  loving  spirit.  He 
knows,  therefore,  that  the  com- 
mands of  the  loving  Father  are  laid 
on  us  in  love,  and  that  we  come  into 
life  and  blessing,  not  in  the  propor- 
tion in  which  we  evade  these  com- 
mands of  the  Father,  but  rather  in 
just  the  proportion  in  which  we 
may  radically  carry  them  through 
to  the  completest  fulfilment.  It  is, 
therefore,  not  because  Christ  desires 
to  lay  upon  us  a  harder  law,  that  he 
gives  such  deep,  inner  interpretation 
of  the  law  of  righteousness  in  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount,  but  only  be- 
cause of  his  consuming  passion  to 
bring  us  into  the  fullest  life. 

The  sin  of  men,  thus,  from 
Christ's  point  of  view,  can  only  be 
seen  in  its  true  depth  and  ugliness 
and  deadliness  when  we  set  it  over 
\gainst  the  love  of  God  and  the 
[78] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

longing  of  the  heavenly  Father  for 
every  son  of  man.  Both  the  great- 
ness and  the  sin  of  men,  therefore, 
are  to  be  seen  only  in  the  light  of 
the  supreme  revelation  of  God  in 
Christ  himself.  And  when  we  thus 
see  men  as  they  are  in  Christ's  ideal, 
and  as  they  are  in  their  estrange- 
ment from  God,  we  see,  at  the  same 
time,  the  true  and  the  false  life. 

And  so  we  have,  as  I  understand 
it,  Christ's  doctrine  of  man,  of  sin, 
and  of  righteousness.  It  all  grows 
directly  out  of  the  thought  of  God 
as  Father.  The  great  essentials  of 
Christ's  thought  here  you  can  make 
plain  even  to  a  child ;  but  its  signifi- 
cance deepens  with  every  year  of 
growth. 


[79] 


LETTER   VI 

THE   CHRISTIAN   LIFE   AS   A 
FRIENDSHIP 


Letter    Six 

THE    CHRISTIAN   LIFE   AS    A 
FRIENDSHIP 

WHEN  Christ  makes  the  sum 
of  his  gospel  the  revelation 
of  God  as  Father,  when  he  sums  up 
all  life  in  the  one  great  command- 
ment of  love  to  God  and  to  men, 
when  he  makes  the  supreme  test  of 
the  judgment  to  lie  in  a  ministering 
love,  —  in  all  these  statements  alike 
he  seems  to  be  declaring  that  the 
life  of  the  disciple  of  Christ  is 
simply  a  life  of  friendship.  It 
seems  to  me  sometimes  that  it  is 
because  of  the  very  simplicity  of 
Christ's  message  that  it  escapes  us. 
We  admit  it  all  as  though  it  were 

[83] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

a  matter  of  course,  and  still  fail  to 
draw  the  first  inferences  from  it. 

And  yet,  in  very  truth  the  Chris- 
tian life  is  a  friendship  —  with 
God,  with  men.  The  problem  of 
life  is  the  problem  of  friendship.  This 
is  to  be  deliberately,  even  philosoph- 
ically, said.  For  persons  are  the 
most  certain  of  facts,  the  most  im- 
portant of  facts,  and  the  most  per- 
manent of  facts. 

Persons  are  the  most  certain  of 
facts.  In  all  our  life  no  fact  is  so 
certain  as  the  existence  of  persons. 
Many  philosophies  have  questioned 
the  reality  of  the  external  world  of 
matter,  but  no  philosophy  has  ever 
seriously  questioned  the  existence  of 
persons. 

Persons,  too,  are  for  us  the  most 
important  facts,  because  in  our  rela- 
tions to  them  we  find   the  greatest 
[84] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

sources  both  of  happiness  and  of 
character.  We  live  in  these  per- 
sonal relations.  It  is  our  friends 
who  reveal  us  to  ourselves ;  our 
friends  who,  in  Emerson's  phrase, 
"  make  us  do  what  we  can/' 

And  persons  are  not  less  certainly 
the  most  abiding  facts.  Only  a 
friendship  can  be  eternal.  "  Love 
never  faileth."  "  The  world  pass- 
eth  away,  .  .  .  but  he  that  doeth 
the  will  of  God  abideth  for  ever." 
Rightly  to  fulfil  these  personal  rela- 
tions, human  and  divine,  in  the 
midst  of  which  we  are  placed, 
that  is,  simply  to  be  a  good  friend, 
is  the  sum  of  all.  For  love  is 
the  central  virtue,  all-embracing. 
As  Paul  argues,  "  Love  worketh  no 
ill  to  his  neighbor  :  love  therefore 
is  the  fulfilment  of  the  law."  The 
conception,  consequently,  of  that 
[85] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

denomination  whom  others  call 
Quakers,  but  who  call  themselves 
"  Friends,"  is  close  to  the  very 
center  of  the  gospel.  Christ  calls 
his  disciples  to  live  the  life  of  obedi- 
ent children  of  God,  and  of  brothers 
one  of  another, — to  have  and  to 
show  increasingly  the  simply  friendly 
spirit. 

And  the  New  Testament  every- 
where conceives  the  relation  in 
which  the  disciple  stands  to  God  as 
an  individual,  intimate,  constant,  and 
unobtrusive  personal  relation  of  the 
Spirit  of  God  to  the  man's  spirit. 
Other  figures  of  speech  are  used  in 
setting  forth  this  relation  ;  but  the 
dominant  conception  throughout  the 
New  Testament  is  personal.  We 
have  a  clear  right,  therefore,  to 
affirm  that  from  the  point  of  view 
of  Christ's  own  teaching,  and  of 
[86] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

the  New  Testament  generally,  the 
Christian  life  is  to  be  conceived 
as  a  personal  relation  of  friendship 
with  God  on  the  one  hand,  and 
with  our  fellow  men  on  the  other. 
When,  then,  you  are  trying  to  bring 
others  into  the  Christian  life,  you 
are  seeking  to  introduce  them  into  a 
life  even  so  simple  as  this.  You  are 
only  trying  to  persuade  them  to  be 
good  friends,  obedient  children  of 
the  heavenly  Father,  true  brothers 
one  of  another.  "  Beloved,  let  us 
love  one  another  :  for  love  is  of 
God ;  and  every  one  that  loveth  is 
begotten  of  God,  and  knoweth 
God." 

Let  me  ask  you  to  think  with  me, 
then,  for  a  moment  of  the  signifi- 
cance of  this  simple  conception  of 
the  Christian  life,  and  to  note  the 
light  which  it  throws  on  the  knowl- 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

edge  of  God,  on  the  unity  of  life,  and 
on  our  relations  to  others. 

I.  And,  first,  how  am  I  to  find 
God  ?  "  This  is  life  eternal/'  John 
makes  Jesus  say,  "  that  they  should 
know  thee  the  only  true  God,  and 
him  whom  thou  didst  send,  even 
Jesus  Christ."  This  conception, 
that  my  relation  to  God  is  primarily 
that  of  a  personal  friendship,  makes 
impossible  a  merely  creedal,  or  tech- 
nically religious  conception  of  that 
relation.  We  need,  no  doubt,  to 
know  many  things  about  God ;  but 
knowledge  about  God  is  not  the  same 
thing  as  that  acquaintance  with  God 
which  Jesus  evidently  has  in  mind. 
It  is  quite  possible,  in  this  sense,  to 
be  Christian  in  head  and  pagan  in 
heart ;  to  have  learned  much  of 
theology,  and  yet  to  be  sadly  clear 
that  one  stands  in  no  close  relation 
[88] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

to  God  himself.  It  is  not  primarily 
by  the  searching  of  the  intellect  that 
we  find  our  way  to  God.  Nor  is  it 
primarily  even  by  religious  exercises 
that  we  draw  near  to  God.  I  should 
wish  to  be  very  far  from  underes- 
timating the  value  of  either  prayer 
or  Bible  study  ;  on  the  contrary,  I 
believe  them  of  vital  importance. 
But  Christ  gave  few  directions  for 
either.  And  he  made  it  very  clear 
that  no  man  was  prepared  to  pray, 
who  was  not  willing  to  have  the 
forgiving  and  the  loving  spirit.  Not 
primarily,  then,  by  the  searching 
of  the  intellect,  and  not  primarily 
by  way  of  religious  exercises,  but 
by  catching,  in  the  presence  of 
Christ,  his  own  spirit  of  love,  are 
we  prepared  to  find  in  him  the  su- 
preme revelation  of  God. 

Only  love  can  believe  in  love  other 
[89] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

than  sentimentally.  And  it  was 
those  who  had  ministered  in  the 
loving  spirit,  who,  Christ  showed, 
had  done  it  even  unto  him.  No 
argument  or  demonstration,  no  ec- 
static visions  of  Christ,  no  religious 
experiences,  no  prophesying  in  his 
name,  can  take  the  place  of  the  lov- 
ing spirit.  The  cup  of  cold  water 
given  in  the  name  of  the  disciple  is 
itself  a  direct  road,  Christ  assures  us, 
to  the  vision  of  the  manifestation  of 
God  in  him.  Just  so  we  find  him. 
But  we  are  often  not  really  willing 
to  take  this  lowly,  simple  way  to 
God.  We  want  to  make  great  de- 
monstrations and  learned  arguments, 
and  feel  the  thrill  of  marvelous 
religious  experiences  with  magical 
changes.  And  yet  it  is  still  true 
that  "  every  one  that  loveth  is  be- 
gotten of  God,  and  knoweth  God." 
[90] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

II.  And  this  conception  of  the 
Christian  life  as  friendship  brings, 
also,  wonderful  unity  into  life.  If  the 
spirit  that  is  required  of  us  in  rela- 
tion both  to  God  and  to  men  is 
essentially  the  same  spirit,  then  all 
our  life  is  wonderfully  simplified 
and  unified.  The  first  and  the 
second  great  commandments  are 
bound  up  together.  God's  lessons 
are  close  at  hand.  Every  human 
relationship  becomes,  thus,  a  teacher 
of  God.  We  are  helped  into  a  true 
love  of  God  in  the  proportion  in 
which  we  are  most  faithfully  fulfil- 
ling the  common  relations  of  our 
daily  life.  To  be  a  good  son,  a 
good  brother,  a  good  husband,  a 
good  father,  a  good  friend,  —  all 
this  directly  helps  into  right  rela- 
tions to  God.  What  it  means  to 
call  God  "  Father,"  and  to  think  of 
[Qi  ] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

ourselves  as  his  "  children,"  and  to 
say  that  he  "  loves "  us,  we  must 
largely  learn  in  the  very  midst  of 
our  human  relationships.  Every 
genuine  love  is,  thus,  both  an  evi- 
dence of  the  divine  love  and  a  prep- 
aration for  it.  The  old  ascetic  and 
monkish  idea,  therefore,  that  we 
were  peculiarly  drawing  near  to 
God  as  we  withdrew  from  human 
relationships,  is  found  to  be  neces- 
sarily out  of  harmony  with  Christ's 
fundamental  conception.  If  the  true 
life  is  the  life  of  love,  we  must 
learn  it  not  apart  from  men,  but 
among  them.  We  draw  near  to 
God  as  we  draw  near  to  men. 

III.  This  simple  conception  of 
the  Christian  life  as  a  friendship 
has  also  its  light  to  throw  upon  our 
relations  to  others.  For  it  empha- 
sizes, on  the  one  hand,  the  duty  of 
[92] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

enlarging  the  circle  of  our  friends, 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  the  duty  of 
deepening  our  friendships.  Obvi- 
ously, if  in  Christ's  thought  the 
world's  goal  is  the  civilization  of 
brotherly  men,  his  disciples  must 
more  and  more  and  everywhere 
prove  themselves  friends.  Impor- 
tant as  it  is  that  one  should  be 
faithful  to  what  we  call  our  specific 
religious  duties  to  other  men,  Christ's 
own  judgment  test  makes  it  clear 
that  the  great  question  of  the 
judgment  will  be,  not,  With  how 
many  have  you  spoken  concerning 
their  souls  ?  but,  With  how  many 
have  you  earned  the  right  to  speak 
of  the  things  that  lie  deepest  and 
are  most  sacred  to  them  ?  With 
how  many  have  you  shown  your- 
self truly  friendly  ?  How  many 
know  that  you  love  them  ?  "  Inas- 
[93] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

much  as  ye  did  it  unto  one  of  these 
my  brethren,  even  these  least,  ye 
did  it  unto  me." 

And  if  the  Christian  life  is  funda- 
mentally friendship,  and  implies  not 
only  the  duty  of  steadily  enlarging 
the  circle  of  our  friends,  but  also 
the  duty  of  deepening  our  friend- 
ships, one  may  well  confront  him- 
self again  and  again  with  the 
questions,  How  deep  and  sacred  a 
thing  is  friendship  to  you  ?  How 
large  and  rich  a  self  are  you  giving 
to  your  friends  ?  Have  you  any 
friendship  that  could  easily  be  con- 
ceived as  a  type  of  the  perfect  life 
in  God  ?  How  far  are  you  achiev- 
ing the  highest  in  friendship  ?  In 
some  measure,  surely,  that  ought  to 
be  true  of  every  disciple  of  Christ 
which  Baron  Bunsen  said  of  his 
wife,  as,  dying,  he  looked  up  into 
[94] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

her  face,  "  In  thy  face  I  have  seen 
the  face  of  the  Eternal."  And  our 
highest  service  to  our  friends  in  seek- 
ing to  bring  them  into  the  eternal 
life  lies  in  this,  that  they  should 
catch  some  glimpses  of  God  through 
our  lives. 


[95] 


LETTER   VII 

THE   BASIS   IN   THE   DIVINE 
FRIENDSHIP 


Letter  Seven 

THE   BASIS   IN   THE    DIVINE 
FRIENDSHIP 

IN  my  last  letter  I  asked  you  to  see 
that,  in  entire  harmony  with 
Christ's  own  thought  and  the  deepest 
trend  of  the  New  Testament  writ- 
ings, we  could  best  conceive  of  the 
Christian  life  as  simply  a  friendship 
—  with  God,  with  men.  If  this  is 
a  true  conception,  then  the  very 
beginning  of  the  life  with  God,  of 
communion  with  him,  is  our  en- 
trance upon  this  divine  friendship, 
which  necessarily  involves,  at  the 
same  time,  a  life  of  love  toward 
men.  The  conditions  of  a  deep- 
ening spiritual  life,  the  conditions 
[99] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

of  all  growth  in  the  Christian  life, 
are  simply  the  conditions  of  a 
deepening  friendship  with  God  and 
men.  And  these  conditions  are 
essentially  the  same  for  our  relation 
with  God  as  for  our  relation  with 
men.  We  may  think  of  our  reli- 
gious life  as  simply  a  deepening 
acquaintance  with  God,  and  may 
ask  at  once  what  the  conditions  are 
upon  which  that  friendship  with 
God  may  deepen. 

Let  us  ask,  then,  what  the  basis 
is  in  any  true  friendship.  If  God 
is  a  person,  and  we  are  persons 
and  our  relation  to  him  is  conse- 
quently first  of  all  a  personal  rela- 
tion, then  the  basis  of  our  personal 
relation  with  him  must  be  that  of 
any  true  friendship.  And  it  is  be- 
cause I  hope  that  you  who  read 
will  find  this  conception  helpful  not 


OP  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

only  in  your  own  lives,  but  es- 
pecially helpful  in  presenting  the 
Christian  life  to  your  friends,  that  I 
am  asking  you  to  note  with  me  that 
the  facts  which  must  lie  at  the 
basis  of  every  friendship  worthy  of 
the  name  are  exactly  those  facts 
that  have  to  be  considered  in  lay- 
ing the  foundation  of  any  genuine 
Christian  life. 

Now  the  foundation  of  all  high 
friendship,  whether  with  God  or 
with  men,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  must 
be  threefold :  mutual  self-revelation 
and  answering  trust,  mutual  self- 
surrender,  and  some  deep  commu- 
nity of  interests. 

I.  And,  first,  at  the  basis  of 
every  friendship,  human  and  divine, 
must  lie  mutual  self-revelation  and 
answering  trust.  All  deepening  of 
personal  relations  involves  such  in- 
[101] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

creasing  revelation  on  the  part  of 
each  of  the  friends,  and  an  answer- 
ing trust  as  well  on  the  part  of 
each.  The  terms  "  revelation  "  and 
"  trust/'  therefore,  that  we  some- 
times think  of  as  peculiarly  religious, 
are  in  truth  not  peculiar  to  religion 
at  all,  but  necessarily  involved  in 
every  true  friendship.  If  a  friend- 
ship is  to  grow,  one  cannot  always 
be  "  on  probation/'  "  Perfect  love 
casteth  out  fear."  Self-revelation  and 
answering  trust  assume,  of  course, 
association.  In  our  relation  to  God, 
it  assumes,  above  all,  our  staying 
in  the  presence  of  Christ  in  the 
Word. 

And  the  trust  that  must  underlie 
our  friendship  with  God,  as  our 
friendship  with  men,  must  be  a 
trust  both  in  the  character  and  in 
the  love  of  the  other.  One  does 

[102] 


OP  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

not  need  to  make  terms  with  a  real 
friend.  He  can  trust  his  friend  out 
of  his  sight.  Now  God  has  meant 
to  make  the  greatest  possible  proof 
both  of  his  character  and  of  his 
love  in  his  revelation  in  Christ. 
He  asks  for  no  trust  without  evi- 
dence. He  might  rather  ask,  Have 
I  not  given  you  reason  to  trust  my 
love?  What  more  can  or  would 
you  ask  than  I  have  already  made 
plain  in  Christ  ?  Growing  revela- 
tion, too,  calls  out  growing  trust,  as 
also  growing  trust  calls  out  growing 
revelation.  The  friendship  deepens 
at  every  point  with  the  growth  of 
this  double  basis. 

It  is  no  mystery,  then,  that  faith 
is  so  prominent  a  word  in  Christian- 
ity, because  we  have  in  Christ  the 
greatest  of  all  self-revelations  of 
the  greatest  person,  calling  out, 
[  103] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

therefore,  the  supreme  faith.  More- 
over, there  is  a  special  reason  why, 
in  our  relation  to  God,  we  must 
walk  by  faith.  If  there  is  danger 
in  any  friendship  that  the  stronger 
personality  may  override  the  life 
of  his  friend,  the  danger  is  still 
greater  in  our  relation  with  God. 
His  relation  to  us  must  not  be  an 
obtrusive  one.  We  need  the  invis- 
ible God.  If  we  are  at  all  to  make 
choices  that  are  our  own,  we  must 
walk  here  by  faith,  not  by  sight. 

And  it  is  not  more  true  that 
God  asks  our  trust  than  that  he 
also  trusts  us.  How  priceless  are 
the  interests  that  he  has  committed 
to  us  in  his  kingdom,  and  how  cer- 
tainly does  the  freedom  from  mere 
rules  in  the  religion  of  Christ  show 
his  willingness  to  rest  all  on  our 
loyal  love  to  him ! 
[104] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

II.    But  in  the  basis  of  any  true 
friendship  there  must  be,  also,  mu- 
tual self-surrender.      Perhaps  the  best 
definition  of  love  that  we  know  is 
the  giving   of  the   self.      It   is    not 
things,    nor     any    certain    kind    of 
treatment     that    we    ask    from    our 
friends,   but  themselves.     This  giv- 
ing of  the  self  presupposes,  of  course, 
trust.     One    cannot  absolutely    sub- 
mit   without    absolute    trust.     And 
the  depth  of  the  friendship  depends 
upon  the  completeness  with  which 
the  self  is   given  ;    the   significance 
of  the  friendship,  upon  the  richness 
of  the  self  given.      One  can  almost 
range  his  friendships,   upon   careful 
thought,   in  an  ascending  scale,  de- 
pending upon  the  extent  to  which 
he    gives    himself  in    them.       And 
the  duty  of  growth  connects   itself 
at  once   with   the  fact   that  in   our 
[105] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

friendships  we  can  ultimately  give 
nothing  but  ourselves.  If,  there- 
fore, we  are  to  have  much  here  to 
give,  we  must  take  pains  to  fulfil 
the  conditions  of  our  own  growth. 

One  who  has  once  wakened  up 
to  the  significance  of  a  high  friend- 
ship certainly  understands  that  such 
a  friendship  is  not,  as  one  has  said, 
"a  weakening  denial  of  self,  but 
a  strengthening  affirmation  of  self," 
that  every  such  added  friendship  is 
an  enlargement  of  life.  When, 
then,  we  try  to  think  of  this  self- 
giving  as  applied  to  our  relation  to 
God,  we  see  at  once  that  the  de- 
mand for  a  surrender  of  ourselves  is 
no  demand  peculiar  to  God,  and  no  de- 
mand arbitrary  in  God.  In  demand- 
ing such  giving  of  ourselves,  God 
makes  the  same  kind  of  demand 
that  we  make  on  one  another. 
[106] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

And  it  is  just  as  certain  that  the  de- 
mand is  not  an  arbitrary  one.  God 
must  ask  that  we  shall  give  ourselves 
completely  to  him,  if  he  is  to  give 
himself  completely  to  us.  It  is 
passing  strange  that  the  terms  "  self- 
surrender/'  "  self-giving,"  "  com- 
plete consecration,"  have  so  hard 
and  different  a  sound  in  religion 
than  in  other  relations.  We  see 
the  facts  as  they  are  only  when  we 
see  that  these  terms  stated  in  the 
relation  to  God,  even  as  in  relation 
to  man,  are  simply  the  inevitable, 
glad  condition  upon  which  alone 
the  best  in  friendship  may  come 
to  us. 

There  seem  to  me,  sometimes,  to 
be  two  opposite  instincts  in  man,  — 
self-devotion  and  the  insatiate  thirst 
for  love.  And  it  is  the  great,  unique 
contribution  of  religion,  that  it 
[107] 


GREATNESS  AND   SIMPLICITY 

introduces  us  to  that  one  relation 
in  which  both  these  instincts  can 
be  absolutely  unchecked  and  com- 
pletely satisfied.  In  every  human 
relation,  even  the  closest  and  dearest, 
there  are  many  limitations.  In  much 
we  must  all  live  alone.  There  is 
only  one  relation  in  which  we  can 
give  ourselves  unstintedly,  only  one 
which  is  wholly  satisfying. 

III.  The  two  fundamental  ele- 
ments in  every  friendship,  and  so  in 
our  friendship  with  God,  already 
noted  —  mutual  self-revelation  and 
answering  trust,  and  mutual  self- 
surrender —  both  point  forward  to 
the  need  of  some  deep  community  of 
interests  in  the  highest  friendship. 
It  is  not  necessary  that  one's  closest 
friends  should  agree  with  him  in  his 
whims  and  fancies  and  hobbies  or 
even  in  his  occupations.  But  it  is 
[108] 


OF   THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

/  necessary  that  there  should  be  agree- 
ment  as  to   the  great   abiding  aims 

\and  ideals  and  purposes.  No  friend- 
ship can  be  all  it  ought  to  be  in 
which  there  is  not  sympathy  in  the 
highest  moments.  If  one  is  con- 
scious that  when  he  is  really  at  his 
best  he  is  obliged  to  leave  his  friends 
outside,  as  not  able  to  understand  or 
enter  into  this  best,  then  he  knows 
the  pain  of  finding  that  his  highest 
self  awakens  no  response  in  his 
closest  friends.  In  the  greatest 
friendships  one  must  be  able  to  say 
to  his  friend,  The  interests  which 
are  supreme  to  you  shall  be  supreme 
to  me.  Not  less  than  this,  cer- 
tainly, must  we  be  able  to  say  to 
God,  if  we  are  to  lay  the  basis  of 
an  abiding  friendship.  It  is  the 
characteristic  petition,  therefore,  of 
the  disciple  of  Christ  that  he  should 
[  109] 


GREATNESS  AND   SIMPLICITY 

pray,  "Thy  kingdom  come.     Thy 
will  be  done." 

Can  we  who  wish  to  be  witnesses 
for  Christ  not  make  it  plain  that 
coming  into  the  Christian  life  is  even 
so  simple  and  yet  so  deep  a  matter 
as  coming  into  the  best  friendships 
anywhere  ?  We  are  children  of  the 
heavenly  Father,  who  has  so  revealed 
himself  to  us  as  to  call  out  our  com- 
pletest  trust,  who  gives  himself  to  us 
as  he  asks  that  we  should  give  our- 
selves to  him,  and  who  seeks  from  us 
that  we  should  identify  our  interests 
and  lives  with  his.  In  laying  this 
plain  basis  of  friendship  with  God, 
we  are  proceeding  precisely  as  in  all 
the  other  deepest  relations  of  life, 
and  the  steps  are  not  more  obscure 
in  the  one  case  than  in  the  other. 


[no] 


LETTER   VIII 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF    DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE   WITH    GOD 


Letter   Eight 

THE  CONDITIONS   OF  DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE    WITH    GOD 

WE  are  trying  together,  let  us 
not  forget,  to  find  our  way 
into  the  deepest  truths  of  the  Chris- 
tian faith  and  life.  We  are  trying 
to  see  them  so  deeply  and  yet  so 
simply  that  we  may  be  able  not  only 
fully  to  grasp  them  for  ourselves, 
but  also  to  be  able  to  make  them 
clear  and  effective  to  others.  I 
have  not  known  how  to  do  this 
with  you  without  using  lines  of 
thought  which  I  have  followed 
elsewhere  in  my  writing.  But  this 
you  will  pardon.  I  have  had  very 
little  to  say  about  the  technical 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

terms  of  theology,  and  yet,  if  you 
will  review  the  ground  now  covered, 
you  will  see  that  we  have  been 
dealing  with  some  of  the  most  fun- 
damental conceptions  of  the  Chris- 
tian faith. 

I  have  not  felt  that  it  was  possible 
for  me  to  bring  you  into  the  very 
heart  of  these  greatest  of  all  truths 
without  constant  reference  to  Christ 
and  to  his  all-inclusive  teaching  of 
the  Father.  We  have  really  simply 
been  asking  for  the  inevitable  impli- 
cations of  his  thought  of  God  as 
Father  and  men  as  children,  when 
we  have  conceived  the  Christian  life 
as  in  its  very  essence  a  friendship, 
and  thus  have  been  asking  what  the 
foundation  to  be  laid  in  such  a 
friendship  must  be.  I  am  to  ask 
you  to  go  with  me  still  a  little 
further  along  this  same  line,  get- 
[ 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

ting  all  the  light  that  it  is  possible 
for  our  best  human  friendships  to 
throw  upon  this  personal  relation 
to  God.  That  is,  how  are  we  to 
go  forward  to  build  upon  the  basis 
already  noted  —  mutual  self-revela- 
tion and  answering  trust,  mutual 
self-surrender,  and  some  deep  com- 
munity of  interests  ?  This  is  to  ask 
how  it  is  that  God  is  redeeming  us 
to  himself. 

i .  An  Unconscious  Growth.  First, 
let  us  make  it  clear  to  ourselves 
that  any  high  friendship  is  much 
more  an  unconscious  growth  than  it  is 
a  work  of  conscious  arrangement.  It 
would  not  be  wise  for  two  friends  to 
say  to  each  other,  Go  to,  now,  let 
us  have  a  great  friendship.  Great 
friendships  are  not  so  brought  about. 
Our  main  concern,  therefore,  in  our 
relation  to  God  should  be  a  careful 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

fulfilment  of  the  conditions  upon 
which  a  friendship  may  naturally 
deepen ;  then  we  may  count  with 
certainty  upon  the  result.  Neither 
in  the  human  nor  in  the  divine  rela- 
tions is  it  usually  possible  for  a  great 
friendship  to  result  from  mere  con- 
scious effort.  The  most  important 
part,  usually,  in  a  friendship  is  the 
result  of  unconscious  growth.  And 
it  would  mean  much  for  the  nor- 
mality and  the  joy  of  our  Christian 
lives,  if  we  could  keep  this  simple 
thought  in  mind. 

2.  No  Continuous  Emotion.  In 
any  friendship,  also,  we  may  well 
remember  that  while  we  do  well  to 
assure  ourselves  of  the  meaning  of 
the  friendship,  we  are  not  to  expect 
continuous  emotion.  There  are,  no 
doubt,  great  differences  here  with 
different  dispositions.  Those  who 
[116] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

find  themselves  naturally  emotional 
in  other  things  may  expect  a  larger 
degree  of  emotion  in  the  religious 
life  than  belongs  to  others.  But  in 
no  case  is  warm  emotion  to  be  ex- 
pected as  a  continuous  experience. 
This  is  indicated,  too,  by  the  char- 
acter of  the  very  natures  involved 
in  such  unbroken  high  emotions. 
Neither  our  physical  nor  mental  con- 
stitutions permit  the  constant  strain. 
To  attempt  this  in  any  personal  rela- 
tion is  simply  to  invite  failure.  The 
deliberate  seeking  of  great  experi- 
ences for  their  own  sake  is  always 
unwise.  The  best  cannot  so  come. 
No  acquaintance,  moreover,  human 
or  divine,  will  stand  constant  intro- 
spection, and  we  cannot,  therefore, 
wisely  subject  our  religious  life  to 
such  persistent  self-examination  as  is 
certain  to  follow  if  emotional  expe- 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

rience  is  made  the  main  aim  and  test. 
Under  such  examination  we  do  not 
see  our  own  states  of  mind  in  their 
normal  condition.  They  inevitably 
change  under  inspection.  The  one 
course  of  wisdom  for  us  is  simply  to 
go  steadily  forward  in  faithful  fulfil- 
ment of  the  natural  conditions  of  a 
deepening  friendship,  and  so  to  be 
sure  of  the  results.  We  can  be  cer- 
tain that  God  desires  to  receive  us  as 
his  children,  and  in  trust  in  his  love 
we  need  only  press  faithfully  on  in 
fulfilling  our  part  in  the  deepening 
of  this  filial  relation. 

3 .  Association.  The  main  factor  in 
a  deepening  acquaintance  is  associa- 
tion. All  directions  for  the  deep- 
ening of  our  friendship  with  God 
may  be  almost  summed  up  in  this 
single  suggestion.  An  acquaintance 
is  not  the  product  of  certain  rules, 
[118] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

but  the  unconscious  result  of  much 
association.  One  wakes  up  with  a 
kind  of  surprise  to  find  how  much  a 
friendship  means  to  him.  And  in 
our  relation  to  God  this  is  still  the 
main  factor.  It  is  only  through 
constant  association  with  God  that 
we  grow  into  his  life.  And  so 
Christ  assures  us  that  the  Spirit  has 
been  given  to  "  be  with  you  for 
ever  "  ;  that  we  are  to  "abide  "  in 
him  and  he  in  us ;  that  we  are  to 
seek  such  unity  with  Christ  as  he 
himself  has  with  the  Father.  The 
greatest  of  all  the  conditions,  there- 
fore, of  a  deepening  acquaintance 
with  God,  is  much  association  with 
him  ;  giving  Christ  opportunity 
with  us  by  attention,  by  thought, 
by  living  much  in  the  atmosphere 
of  his  life,  by  finding  it  second 
nature  to  think  his  thoughts,  to 
[119] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

feel  his  feelings,  and  to  will  his 
purposes. 

4.  Time.  Time  is  necessary  for 
growth  into  anything  of  really  great 
value.  We  need  not  be  surprised, 
therefore,  to  find  that  a  main  condi- 
tion of  growing  into  a  deepening 
friendship  with  God  must  be  the 
giving  of  some  time.  No  acquaint- 
ance can  become  deep  without  time 
given.  Any  love  will  grow  cold  to 
which  no  time  is  given.  This  is  the 
practical  way  in  which  we  do  give 
ourselves  to  our  friends.  One  has 
only  to  look  over  his  own  experience 
to  see  that  he  has  allowed  certain 
friendships  quite  to  drift  out  of  his 
life  simply  because  a  little  time  was 
not  expended  to  keep  them  alive. 

It  is  just  here  that  there  lies  the 
prime  significance  of  the  taking  of 
daily  time  for  Bible  study  and  for 

[   120] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

prayer.  These  are  no  magical  con- 
ditions. In  recognizing  their  neces- 
sity, we  are  simply  fulfilling  the 
same  conditions  which  hold  for  any 
true  friendship.  Just  as  it  is  a 
matter  of  serious  importance  in  the 
family  that  the  members  of  the 
household  should  be  often  together, 
so  we  need  to  put  ourselves  in  the 
presence  of  God  in  the  use  of  his 
Word  and  of  prayer,  that  he  may 
have  opportunity  to  share  with  us 
his  own  life,  and  to  bring  us  into 
some  real  unity  with  him. 

And  besides  these  special  daily 
times  of  association  with  God,  we 
may  well  remember,  also,  the  signifi- 
cance of  occasional  longer  times.  One 
knows  how  certain  friendships  have 
deepened  for  him  immensely  because 
the  two  friends  have  been  shut  up 
to  each  other  for  a  considerable 

[121] 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

time,  perhaps  in  travel,  so  that  they 
have  been  almost  obliged  to  get 
down  beneath  the  mere  surface  of 
their  lives,  and  through  the  longer 
association,  to  come  to  share  some- 
thing of  the  inmost  and  best  that 
has  been  given  them.  So  in  our 
relation  to  God,  an  occasional  tak- 
ing of  a  much  longer  time  than 
is  usual  for  the  daily  Bible  study 
and  prayer,  may  yield  large  results. 
For  myself,  I  am  sure  that  nothing 
has  been  worth  so  much  to  me  in 
my  own  life  as  the  times  when  I 
have  been  able  to  stay  face  to  face 
with  God  in  the  Word  for  three  or 
four  hours  at  a  stretch,  taking  oppor- 
tunity really  to  get  down  into  the 
great  truths  and  to  get  some  glimpse 
of  the  great  revelations  of  God. 

5.    The  importance  for  a  growing 
Christian  life  of  the  regular  use  of  the 

[   122] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

Bible  is  so  great  that  it  deserves 
special  emphasis.  We  are  to  remem- 
ber that  decision  for  the  Christian 
life  means  the  opening  of  the  life 
to  God,  and  that  its  continuance, 
consequently,  depends  on  keeping 
the  life  so  open  to  this  new,  great- 
est, transforming,  personal  relation. 
And  keeping  the  life  so  open  de- 
pends, in  its  turn,  above  all,  on 
regular  Bible  study.  He  who  keeps 
such  study  steadily  going  is  practi- 
cally certain  to  maintain  his  Chris- 
tian life  and  to  grow  intelligently 
in  it.  He  who  does  not  is  pretty 
certain  finally  to  fail. 

The  reasons  for  this  central  im- 
portance of  the  Scripture  can  be 
seen  from  different  points  of  view. 
For  if  we  start  from  the  idea  of 
environment,  we  must  remember 
that  that  part  of  our  environment 

[   "33 


GREATNESS    AND   SIMPLICITY 

makes  us  to  which  we  attend.  And 
probably  the  greatest  way  in  which 
we  can  be  sure  to  put  ourselves 
within  reach  of  a  strong  spiritual 
environment  is  through  regular 
Bible  study.  Moreover,  the  mind 
readily  recurs  to  its  habitual  objects 
of  thought.  And  it  is  these  habitual 
objects  which  are  certain  to  domi- 
nate the  life.  If  we  are  habitually 
turning,  thus,  to  the  great  moral 
and  spiritual  resources  of  the  Scrip- 
ture, we  have  the  right  to  count  on 
a  deepening  spiritual  life. 

Or,  if  we  look  at  the  matter  from 
the  point  of  view  of  personal  associ- 
ation, the  universal  law  to  be  recog- 
nized is  that  we  become  like  those 
with  whom  we  constantly  are,  to 
whom  we  voluntarily  surrender  our- 
selves, and  who  give  themselves 
unreservedly  to  us.  Now  the  Scrip- 
[124] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

ture  offers  us,  in  preeminent  degree, 
just  such  association.  It  allows  us 
to  come  into  close  personal  contact 
with  God-touched  men,  —  those  to 
whom  and  through  whom  God  has 
most  effectively  spoken.  We  have 
here  the  opportunity  of  sharing  their 
visions,  and  so  of  being  introduced, 
through  these  greatest  seers,  into 
some  of  the  deeps  of  the  spiritual 
world.  Here,  too,  in  the  Scripture 
is  the  record  of  the  preeminent 
meetings  of  God  with  men,  into 
which  it  is  possible  for  us  to  enter. 

And  the  Scripture  gives  us,  as 
does  nothing  else,  the  possibility  of 
laying  that  foundation  of  a  true  per- 
sonal relation  with  God  of  which 
we  have  spoken.  For  it  is  a  record 
of  his  dealings  with  men,  and  so  of 
such  a  revelation  of  him  as  makes 
possible  our  answering  trust.  It 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

calls  out  again  and  again  our  self- 
surrender  in  particulars.  And  it 
brings  us  in  its  atmosphere  into 
some  community  of  interest  with 
God  in  Christ.  As  we  thus  give 
time  to  our  Bible  study,  we  are 
entering  into  the  transforming  asso- 
ciation with  God,  which  must  be 
the  main  factor  in  deepening  our 
acquaintance  with  him ;  and  to 
come  really  to  know  God  is  life 
eternal. 

In  my  next  letter  I  want  to  call 
your  attention  to  some  other  impor- 
tant conditions  of  deepening  still 
further  this  friendship  with  God. 


[126] 


LETTER   IX 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF  DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE    WITH    GOD 

(^Continued) 


Letter    Nine 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF  DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE   WITH    GOD 

(JSontinuecT) 

IN  this  letter  I  wish  to  call  your 
attention  to  a  single  great  funda- 
mental means,  if  our  acquaintance 
with  God  is  to  deepen  as  it  ought. 
The  principle  —  and  to  it  I  wish  to 
devote  the  entire  letter  —  is  simply 
this :  that  if  our  relation  to  God  is 
to  grow  in  significance,  it  needs 
expression.  It  is  one  of  the  central 
propositions  of  modern  psychology, 
that  in  body  and  mind  we  are  made 
for  action,  for  the  expression  in  some 
active  way  of  every  bodily  and  men- 
tal state.  No  idea  or  feeling  or 

9  [  129  ] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

purpose  can  come  to  its  full  signifi- 
cance for  any  of  us  without  expres- 
sion. The  general  psychological 
law  here  is,  that  that  which  is  not 
expressed  dies.  Let  us  apply  just  this 
law,  now,  with  some  real  care  to  our 
religious  life.  For  if  the  law  is  a 
true  one,  we  cannot  expect  full 
reality  in  our  religious  life  if  we  fail 
to  give  careful  heed  to  this  principle 
of  expression.  If,  therefore,  one 
wishes  his  religious  life  to  mean  all 
possible  to  him,  he  must  express  it 
in  significant  action.  Otherwise,  it 
is  likely  to  become  either  the  senti- 
mentality of  mere  passive  emotion, 
or  only  the  dogmatic  holding  of  cer- 
tain opinions.  The  need  of  expression 
is  a  perpetual  one  everywhere.  So 
in  any  friendship,  if  you  would  have 
your  love  mean  much,  you  must  in 
various  ways  give  it  expression. 
[ 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

I.  Expression  by  Word.  Many 
of  us  are  naturally  reserved,  and  are 
chary  and  half  ashamed  to  express 
the  best  in  us ;  and  repression  in  any 
personal  relation  is  likely  to  grow 
on  one  apace.  Any  friendship  needs, 
at  times  at  least,  expression  in  word. 
It  is  not  only  well  for  others  that 
they  should  know  occasionally  the 
pleasure  we  find  in  their  companion- 
ship, it  is  important  for  ourselves. 
And  our  relation  to  Christ  certainly 
will  not  be  to  us  what  it  ought  unless 
we  take  some  pains  to  say,  in  dif- 
ferent, simple,  and  perhaps  largely 
private  ways,  what  Christ  means  to 
us.  We  are  not  to  underestimate 
here  the  value  of  simple  witness. 
Christ's  program  for  the  conquest 
of  the  world  was  through  a  campaign 
of  simple  testimony  from  heart  to 
heart  of  what  Christ  meant.  Many 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

of  our  closest  personal  relations  suffer 
from  lack  of  this  simple  expression 
in  word.  And  we  need  not  think 
it  strange  that  the  same  principle 
should  hold  in  the  religious  life. 
Does  any  one  know  how  much 
Christ  really  means  to  you,  not 
simply  from  some  half  formal  ex- 
pression in  prayer-meeting,  but  from 
the  speaking  out  of  your  heart  in 
close  and  intimate  fellowship  with 
another  ?  Are  you  taking  pains  that 
others  shall  know  ?  Do  you  really 
mean  to  be  able,  here,  to  speak  with 
authority  from  first-hand  knowledge 
out  of  your  own  experience  ?  You 
can  only  bear  witness,  but  you  are 
to  bear  witness  of  what  Christ  really, 
honestly  is  to  you.  How  else  shall 
others  find  him  much  to  them  ?  It 
is  so  preeminently  that  the  king- 
dom of  God  must  grow.  And  it  is 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

so,  also,  that  your  own  sense  of  per- 
sonal relation  to  God  will  grow. 

2.  Seeking  to  Please  in  Little 
Things.  And  friendship  needs  as 
well  not  only  the  witness  of  the 
word,  but  that  expression  that  is 
found  in  seeking  to  please  one's 
friend  in  little  things.  Perhaps  the 
best  test  of  a  true  love  is  to  be  found 
just  here.  For  few  of  us  are  likely 
to  fail  in  the  great  demands  that  our 
personal  relations  make  upon  us. 
But  we  are  much  more  likely  to  fail 
in  the  thousand  and  one  little  ways 
in  which  the  real  spirit  of  our  rela- 
tion to  another  is  tested.  The  chief 
mark  of  obedience  is  not  shown  at 
the  great  crises,  but  is  found  rather 
in  that  sensitiveness  of  conscience 
that  makes  us  careful  to  do  what  is 
well  pleasing  to  God,  even  in  the 
slighter  things.  The  cup  of  cold 


GREATNESS  AND  SIMPLICITY 

water  given  in  the  name  of  a  disciple, 
Christ  assures  us,  is  taken  as  given 
directly  to  him.  And  if  one  finds, 
in  a  personal  relation,  that  he  is  al- 
ways having  his  own  way,  however 
smoothly  and  graciously  that  may 
seem  to  be  occurring,  he  may  well 
suspect  that  he  is  guilty  of  real  self- 
ishness. And  this  same  spirit  is 
likely  to  pursue  him  in  that  most 
fundamental  relation  —  the  relation 
in  which  he  stands  to  God  in  Jesus 
Christ.  This  expression  of  one's 
love  in  little  things  requires  time, 
attention,  and  thoughtfulness.  If  we 
are  really  to  minister  in  Christ's 
name,  and  to  minister  unto  others 
as  unto  Christ,  we  shall  hardly  suc- 
ceed without  the  sympathy  that  is 
free  from  preoccupation  and  able  to 
put  itself  in  the  other's  place.  A 
reverent  love  for  another  shows  itself 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

in  trifles  of  manner.  And  our  love 
to  Christ  will  best  show  itself  in 
similar  care  in  the  trifles  of  our  daily 
life.  We  make  no  sacrifice  so  great 
as  that  which  manifests  itself  in  what 
we  count  the  small  things  of  daily 
living. 

"  More  careful  not  to  serve  Thee  much, 
But  please  Thee  perfectly." 

3.  By  Gratitude.  And  true  love 
needs  especially  that  expression  which 
finds  its  outlet  in  gratitude.  Grati- 
tude has  rare  power  to  bring  men 
together.  It  is  hardly  possible  for 
any  one  to  say  honestly  to  another 
how  much  what  the  other  has  said 
or  done  or  been,  means  to  him, 
without  a  distinct  strengthening  of 
the  ties  between  the  two  lives.  The 
honest  expression  of  gratitude  brings 
men  together  as  few  things  do.  On 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

the  other  hand,  thoughtless  ingrati- 
tude chills  greatly  any  friendship. 
Even  where  there  is  no  desire  to 
cherish  resentment,  the  person  to 
whom  the  gratitude  is  due  cannot 
'avoid  a  feeling  of  real  hurt.  There 
are  few  things  harder  to  bear,  per- 
haps, in  our  daily  life  with  others 
than  to  feel  that  the  sacrifices  that 
have  cost  us  most  have  been  all  un- 
appreciated and  taken  practically  as 
mere  matters  of  course.  Do  we 
always  appreciate  the  loneliness  of 
those  who  stand  nearest  us  ?  And 
are  we  not  too  chary  of  the  word  of 
appreciation  and  of  praise  that  might 
mean  much  more  than  we  think  ? 
It  is  not  well  in  any  personal  relation 
that  too  much  should  be  perpetually 
taken  for  granted.  And  so  in  our 
relation  to  God,  we  shall  find  few 
things  so  kindling  our  hearts  and  so 
[136] 


OP  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

helping  to  make  real  the  relation  in 
which  we  stand  to  God,  as  to  go 
carefully  over  the  manifold  occasions 
for  thanksgiving,  and  to  take  pains 
to  express  our  gratitude  to  the  heav- 
enly Father  for  the  mercies  of  the 
daily  life.  There  are  very  few 
hearts  that  will  not  respond  to  a 
careful  review  of  the  occasions  for 
thanksgiving.  "In  everything  give 
thanks,"  the  Apostle  writes  to  the 
Thessalonians,  "for  this  is  the  will 
of  God  in  Christ  Jesus  to  you-ward." 
And  this  single  injunction  strikes 
much  closer  to  the  very  heart  of  our 
religious  life  than  we  often  think. 

4.  By  Sharing  Burdens.  How 
close  are  the  companionships  which 
grow  up  in  the  mutual  sharing 
of  trial  and  struggle  and  danger ! 
This,  I  suppose,  is  what  makes  so 
significant  the  companionship  of 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

soldiers  who  have  been  long  together 
in  successive  campaigns.  The  bur- 
dens that  we  share  inevitably  tend 
to  draw  our  souls  together.  And 
it  is  just  at  this  point  that  people 
sometimes  make  serious  mistakes  — 
parents  in  trying  to  spare  their  chil- 
dren, the  husband  the  wife,  the 
friend  his  friend.  For,  to  refuse  to 
let  your  close  friend  into  your  inner 
struggle  and  burden  means  often 
simply  keeping  him  out  of  the  deep- 
est part  of  your  life,  treating  him 
like  a  child.  This  is  not  to  spare 
him  so  much  as  to  defraud  him. 
And  it  is  one  of  the  highest  honors 
conferred  upon  us  by  Christ  that  he 
does  not  deal  with  us  in  this  way. 
Rather,  he  calls  us  into  the  sharing 
of  his  own  suffering ;  and  he  says  to 
his  immediate  disciples,  "  Ye  are  they 
that  have  continued  with  me  in  my 
[138] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

temptations."  From  this  point  of 
view,  too,  therefore,  we  may  well 
say  with  Peter,  "  Insomuch  as  ye 
are  partakers  of  Christ's  sufferings, 
rejoice/'  That  two  souls  should 
commit  themselves  with  all  the 
power  of  completest  self-devotion 
in  sacrifice  to  the  same  great  cause, 
is  to  insure  essential  closeness  of 
fellowship.  And  it  is  this  fellow- 
ship that  Christ  offers  us  with  him- 
self. And  just  as  it  is  often  only  in 
the  times  of  peculiar  burden  and 
trial  that  the  best  and  greatest  and 
deepest  in  our  friends  reveals  itself, 
so,  too,  it  must  often  be  that  only 
at  such  times  shall  we  taste  the  full 
meaning  of  the  heavenly  Father's 
love  and  care.  And  in  that  mutual- 
ness  which  belongs  to  every  great 
friendship,  Christ  not  only  shares  his 
great  purposes  and  sacrifices  with  us, 
[  139] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

but  he  asks  us,  in  like  manner,  to 
bring  to  him  all  our  burdens,  to  find 
them  lightened  for  us  in  the  thought 
of  his  sympathy  and  uplift. 

5.  By  Sacrifice.  And  this  leads 
us  to  see  distinctly  that  no  love  can 
mean  most  to  us  for  which  we  have 
not  genuinely  sacrificed.  A  love 
that  has  cost  us  nothing  is  not  likely 
to  mean  much  in  the  beginning,  nor 
to  grow  to  much  in  the  end.  It  is 
true  that  where  the  love  is  great  and 
strong,  the  sacrifice  will  be  a  joy, 
rather  than  a  sorrow.  But  some 
deep  and  significant  giving  of  one- 
self there  must  be  in  any  personal 
relation  that  is  to  greatly  count. 
Sacrifices  increase  love.  Our  hearts 
are  where  our  treasure  is.  Where 
we  have  invested  little,  we  shall  care 
little.  And  one  need  not  be  sur- 
prised to  find  that  his  Christian  life 
[ 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

means  little  to  him,  if  he  has  not 
been  willing  to  render  to  Christ  the 
sacrifice  of  time,  of  thought,  of 
attention,  of  giving,  of  sacrifice  that 
should  really  mean  something  in 
helping  to  bring  to  its  goal  that  great 
kingdom  of  God  that  is  to  satisfy 
the  longing  heart  of  our  Lord.  In 
our  selfishness  it  is  sometimes  diffi- 
cult for  us  to  understand  it ;  but  the 
whole  religion  of  Christ  is  based  on 
the  fundamental  principle  that  our 
highest  joy  can  be  found  only  in  this 
positive  giving  of  ourselves  unto  men 
and  unto  God  in  redemptive  service, 
so  entering  into  the  very  heart  of 
Christ's  own  life  and  joy  and  peace. 
Such  expression  of  our  personal 
friendship  with  God,  by  the  witness- 
ing word,  by  seeking  to  please  in 
little  things,  by  gratitude,  by  sharing 
burdens,  by  sacrifice,  will  as  certainly 


GREATNESS  AND   SIMPLICITY 

deepen  our  friendship  with  God  as 
these  same  things  deepen  our  friend- 
ship with  men,  and  both  results  are 
as  certain  as  the  existence  of  law  in 
the  world  at  all.  May  I  hope  that 
this  thought  will  help  to  bring  more 
unity  and  simplicity  into  both  your 
thinking  and  living  ? 


[142] 


LETTER   X 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF  DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE    WITH    GOD 

(Continued*) 


Letter   Ten 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF  DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE  WITH    GOD 

(Continued) 

I  SHALL  not  quite  have  brought 
out  for  you  what  seems  to  me 
to  be  the  full  force  of  this  thought 
of  the  Christian  life  as  a  friendship 
with  God,  without  calling  your 
attention,  in  this  letter,  to  three  or 
four  further  considerations  which 
affect  any  growing  friendship. 

i.  The  Slight  Causes  of  Diffi- 
culty. And,  first,  there  are  few 
cautions,  probably,  that  the  man 
who  would  be  a  true  friend  needs 
more  to  take  to  heart  than  the  cau- 
tion to  be  on  his  guard  against  slight 

10  ;  145  ] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

occasions  of  estrangement.  In  no 
personal  relation  that  concerns  us 
deeply  can  we  safely  harbor  or  dwell 
on  the  small  points  of  controversy. 
Our  only  safety  lies  in  clearing  them 
up  at  once.  Great  estrangements 
grow  from  them.  Both  in  our  hu- 
man and  our  divine  relations  we  are 
more  in  danger  of  getting  away  in 
the  little  than  in  the  great  things. 
The  deeper  the  friendship  one  has 
with  another  the  more  sensitive  one 
is  to  these  little  differences.  One  soon 
learns  to  interpret  the  slightest  indica- 
tions of  face  or  gesture  or  movement. 
And  so  in  our  relation  to  God, 
our  progress  is  measured  in  part  by 
our  sensitiveness  as  to  the  little 
things.  We  need,  for  our  high- 
est safety  as  well  as  for  our  joy, 
unclouded  communion  with  the 
Father.  Sensitive  obedience  in  the 
[146] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

littles  is  both  the  proof  of  our  love 
and  God's  way  of  guidance,  and 
the  direct  road  to  more  intimate 
acquaintance  with  God.  On  the 
other  hand,  disobedience  in  the  little 
things  constantly  mars  the  relation. 
In  all  our  close  friendships  it  is 
also  worth  emphasis  that  we  are  not 
to  look  to  and  constantly  dwell  on  little 
differences  and  faults  in  our  friends. 
This  faultfinding  and  complaining 
spirit  is  quite  sufficient  to  spoil  any 
love,  even  the  deepest.  This  spirit 
kept  up  in  relation  to  a  child  may 
easily  end  in  "  rooted  antipathy ): 
on  his  part ;  the  bonds  of  sympathy 
are  ruptured,  and  a  spirit  of  entire 
discouragement  results.  By  fixing 
your  attention  on  defects,  you  can 
ruin  a  friendship  that,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  quite  capable  of  becoming 
your  chief  joy.  And  a  similar  cau- 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

tion  is  needed  not  less  in  our  relation 
to  God.  It  is  quite  possible  to  pick 
out  of  the  allotment  that  has  provi- 
dentially come  to  us  the  encouraging 
or  the  discouraging  things,  and  so 
thankfully  to  rejoice,  on  the  one 
hand,  or  bitterly  to  complain,  on  the 
other.  The  complaining  spirit  is 
often  felt  not  to  be  a  serious  matter, 
but  one  has  only  to  think  how  fatal 
are  its  results  in  other  personal  rela- 
tions to  see  how  certainly  it  must 
disturb  any  deep  sense  of  trust  and 
love  and  gratitude  in  our  relation  to 
God.  This  complaining  spirit  cuts 
the  very  root  of  a  possible  deepen- 
ing friendship  with  God,  and  is  to 
be  recognized,  therefore,  in  all  its 
seriousness  as  one  of  the  deadliest 
enemies  of  a  true  and  joyful  and 
peaceful  Christian  life.  It  is  not  a 
small  sin  nor  a  small  danger. 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

2.  Sacred  Respect  for  the  Person- 
ality of  Tour  Friend.  Perhaps  the 
subtlest  of  all  the  conditions  for 
deepening  any  true  and  worthy 
friendship  is  to  be  found  in  sacred 
respect  for  the  personality  of  your 
friend.  Where  that  is  fundamen- 
tally lacking  no  great  and  worthy 
friendship  can  possibly  result.  And 
many  a  friendship  has  been  greatly 
damaged  by  such  a  lack.  There 
are  limitations  to  all  intimacies  with 
others,  and  even  in  the  closest  friend- 
ships we  are  not  to  presume,  we 
are  not  to  pry,  we  are  not  to  scold. 
We  are  not  to  take  away  the  possi- 
bility of  decision  or  choice,  not  even 
in  the  case  of  a  child.  We  are  not 
to  insist  on  the  explanation  of  every 
mood.  Every  soul  must  in  much 
be  alone,  and  ought  to  be.  One 
only  degrades  his  friendships,  I  have 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

felt  compelled  often  to  say,  when 
he  measures  them  by  the  number 
of  privacies  that  he  rides  over 
roughshod. 

And  in  our  relation  to  God  we 
are  not  to  forget,  upon  his  part, 
how  marvelously  he  respects  our 
freedom,  and  how,  though  he  is 
Lord  of  all,  he  stands  only  without 
the  door  of  our  hearts  to  knock  for 
admittance.  God  does  not  arbitra- 
rily obtrude  or  interfere.  So  truly 
does  he  respect  our  personality  that 
he  does  not  step  in,  even  occasion- 
ally, to  "  set  things  right/'  He 
has  put  us  in  no  play  world,  but 
in  a  world  in  which  our  choice 
and  our  personality  are  fully  re- 
spected. 

And,  upon  our  own  part,  this 
spirit  of  reverence  which  is  so  neces- 
sary in  our  relation  to  our  friends 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

cannot  be  less  necessary  in  our  rela- 
tion to  God.  No  friend  can  be  to 
us  what  he  might  be  without  rever- 
ence both  on  his  part  and  on  ours. 
Still  less  can  God  give  us  his  com- 
plete gift,  if  our  reverence  does  not 
answer  to  his  reverential  treatment 
of  us.  Reverence  is,  indeed,  not  a 
formal  matter  of  any  kind  of  con- 
duct or  of  respect  for  places  and 
things ;  and  a  deep,  inner  rever- 
ence may  quite  conceivably  exist 
where  the  outward  conduct  might 
seem  to  the  careless  observer  irrev- 
erent. But  if  it  is  in  any  degree 
true,  as  it  has  been  frequently 
charged  of  late,  that  the  present 
generation  is  growing  in  irrever- 
ence, let  us  make  it  quite  clear  to 
ourselves  that  we  are,  in  just  that 
degree,  striking  at  the  very  root  of 
all  true  personal  relations  to  God  or 
[ 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

men.  The  attitude  of  presumption, 
of  prying,  of  scolding,  of  dictation 
must  be  far  removed  from  our  rela- 
tion to  God.  There  is  a  false  bold- 
ness, as  Luther  remarked,  which 
talks  to  God  as  a  man  might  talk  to 
a  "  cobbler's  lad."  It  is  not  for  us 
to  demand  the  time  or  the  manner 
of  God's  revelation.  "  The  secret 
of  the  Lord  is  with  them  that  fear 
him."  And  if  even  our  smallest 
human  spirit  has  its  holy  of  holies 
that  may  not  be  inconsiderately 
violated,  how  much  more  must 
deep  reverence  characterize  all  our 
thought  of  God !  We  are  to  "  work 
out  our  own  salvation  with  fear  and 
trembling  ;  for  it  is  God  who  work- 
eth  in  us  both  to  will  and  to  work, 
for  his  good  pleasure."  It  was  not 
by  accident  that  the  great  prayer  that 
was  to  characterize  the  disciples  of 
[  152] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

Christ   in   all   ages  began  with   the 
word,  "  Hallowed." 

3.  Be  Real.  Once  more,  no 
friendship  is  safe  into  which  the 
element  of  pretense  is  introduced. 
We  are  to  be  real  only  and  always. 
There  are  to  be  no  false  assertions, 
and  no  forced  feeling.  We  are  not 
to  start  or  continue  on  a  false  basis. 
While,  as  I  have  said,  we  are  not  to 
question  our  love  or  that  of  another 
on  slight  occasions,  we  are  still  to  be 
sure  that  we  are  scrupulously  hon- 
est ;  that  we  say  what  we  mean,  and 
only  what  we  mean ;  that  the  wit- 
ness we  bear  to  Christ,  though  it  be 
a  modest  witness,  is  just  so  far  as  it 
goes  a  genuinely  honest  one.  In 
our  prayers,  too,  we  must  learn  how 
to  tell  the  truth,  not  to  take  upon 
our  lips  expressions  even  of  the 
Scriptures,  which  we  cannot  truth- 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

fully  transfer  to  our  own  experience. 
We  are  not  even  to  repeat,  out  of 
our  previous  lives,  expressions  not 
now  real.  We  are  to  make  sure, 
that  is,  throughout,  that  we  do  not 
introduce  that  element  of  pretense 
that  always  means  finally  a  deadly 
sense  of  unreality.  He  who  will 
not  be  real  saps  thereby  all  reality 
in  his  relation  with  God  as  well  as 
in  his  relation  with  men. 

4.  You  May  Deepen  Tour  Ac- 
quaintance 'with  God  through  Seeing 
What  Others  Have  Received  from 
Him.  If  one  thinks  of  a  great, 
many-sided  nature  like  that  of  Aris- 
totle, or  Leibnitz,  or  Luther,  or 
Shakespeare,  he  will  realize  at  once 
that  different  sides  of  the  nature 
will  be  revealed  to  different  persons. 
And  one  comes  into  the  completest 
understanding  of  such  a  nature  only 
[i54] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

through  glimpses  of  table-talk  and 
letters  and  home  life,  and  from 
knowing  his  intimate  friends.  In 
exactly  the  same  way  we  can  come 
to  know  God,  even  approximately, 
in  his  fulness  only  as  we  take 
account  not  only  of  our  own  per- 
sonal experience,  but  supplement  it 
with  the  largeness  of  the  experience 
of  others  as  well.  We  need  in  all 
things  constantly  the  correction  of 
others.  Our  own  view  is  necessa- 
rily partial,  and  has  its  own  inevi- 
table narrow  limitations.  Much  of 
the  best  that  God  has  for  us  must 
come  through  others.  And  even  in 
this  deepest  matter  of  our  personal 
relation  to  God,  we  are  not  made 
independent  one  of  another.  God 
has  some  special,  peculiar  message 
to  speak  through  each  soul ;  and  he 
may  speak  as  really  to  us  through 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

another's  life,  as  in  his  own  direct 
communion  with  us.  This  recog- 
nition of  the  constant  need  we  all 
have  of  Christian  fellowship  empha- 
sizes, from  another  point  of  view, 
thus,  the  importance  of  the  Bible, 
in  which  it  may  be  said  we  are  able 
to  put  ourselves  in  touch  with  the 
most  intimate  friends  of  God.  We 
can  here  see  what  God  has  meant 
to  others,  and  so  supplement  and 
broaden  and  deepen  our  own  view. 
In  this  constant  and  wise  use  of 
fellowship  with  others,  and  in  that 
objective  expression  of  our  religious 
life  in  service,  of  which  I  earlier 
spoke,  you  will  be  saved  from  the 
brooding  subjectivity  that  might 
otherwise  beset  your  Christian  life. 
The  thought  of  our  Christian  life  as 
a  personal  relation  with  God  does 
not  shut  us  up  to  ourselves.  The 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

relation  to  God  is  so  absolute  and 
infinite  that  we  need  and  can  bring 
to  it  all  the  help  of  the  supplemen- 
tary experience  of  others. 

In  insisting  thus  at  length,  as  I 
have  in  these  last  four  letters,  upon 
the  fundamental  significance  of  the 
conception  of  the  Christian  life  as 
the  beginning  and  deepening  of  a 
friendship  with  God,  I  have  simply 
been  trying  to  place  before  you,  in 
terms  of  the  personal  life  and  ex- 
perience you  already  know,  those 
great,  fundamental  Christian  doc- 
trines which  have  been  so  long 
discussed  under  the  names  "  con- 
version," "  regeneration/'  "  sanctifi- 
cation,"  "  baptism  of  the  Spirit/' 
and  "faith  and  works."  I  have 
intentionally  tried  to  strip  the  dis- 
cussion of  all  these  more  or  less 
technical  terms,  because  I  fear  they 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

have  often  served  to  hide  rather 
than  to  reveal  the  real  truth  as  it  is 
in  Christ.  And  I  have  tried,  rather, 
to  get  back  to  what  seems  to  me  to 
be  the  central  conception  of  Christ 
and  of  the  New  Testament,  that 
the  Christian  life  is  simply  that  of 
a  growing  child  of  the  heavenly 
Father,  and  to  ask  you  to  see,  in 
some  detail,  just  what  that  great 
central  thought  of  Christ  meant. 
I  hope  the  attempt  has  not  been 
without  value  for  you,  and  I  hope 
still  more  that  through  you  it  may 
bring  something  more  of  light  and 
blessing  into  the  lives  of  others.  I 
am  simply  trying  to  hand  on  to  you 
that  one  great  fundamental  thought 
that  has,  perhaps,  meant  more  than 
any  other  to  me. 


[158] 


LETTER   XI 

THE   FUNDAMENTAL   TEMPTA- 
TIONS 


Letter  Eleven 

THE   FUNDAMENTAL   TEMPTA- 
TIONS 

WHEN  one  turns  from  the 
conception  of  the  Christian 
life  as  a  deepening  personal  relation 
of  a  child  with  the  heavenly  Father, 
to  ask  still  more  practically  just  what 
this  conception  of  Christ  means  in 
living,  he  will  find  himself  confront- 
ing, just  as  Christ  did,  certain  great 
fundamental  temptations  that  under- 
lie, I  think,  all  the  temptations  of 
life.  And  I  have  thought  I  could 
not  serve  you  better  in  this  letter 
than  by  trying  to  make  clear  just 
these  always-present  temptations. 

In  his  tremendous  sense  of  son- 
ship,  of  mission,  and  of  power,  Christ 

ii  [  161  ] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

took  to  his  temptations  a  threefold 
consciousness.  The  elements  in  this 
threefold  consciousness,  of  power,  of 
mission,  and  of  sonship,  were  for 
Christ  a  divine  call,  to  which  he 
made  answer :  I  must  be  worthy  of 
the  power  granted ;  I  must  be  a 
consistent  founder  of  a  spiritual 
kingdom  ;  I  must  prove  a  true  son. 
And  one  cannot  be  a  consistent 
founder  of  a  spiritual  kingdom,  it 
is  to  be  noted,  except  upon  three 
conditions  :  constant  spiritual  sensi- 
tiveness, undying  faith  in  men,  and 
refusal  to  seek  relief  in  change  of 
circumstances  rather  than  in  change 
of  self. 

The  temptations  which  are  thus 
seen  to  underlie  all  the  temptations 
of  Christ,  and  the  temptations  of  all 
men,  are :  the  temptation  to  abuse 
of  trust,  the  temptation  to  fall  below 
[162] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

one's  highest  spiritual  sensitiveness, 
the  temptation  to  seek  relief  in 
change  of  circumstances  rather  than 
in  change  of  self,  the  temptation  to 
disbelief  in  men,  the  temptation  to 
distrust  of  God.  Just  these,  I  judge, 
are  the  temptations  which  confront 
every  man  in  all  that  threatens  his 
moral  and  spiritual  life.  For  the 
elements  of  Christ's  consciousness 
are  in  only  less  degree  the  elements 
of  the  consciousness  of  us  all. 

i.  The  Temptation  to  Abuse  of 
Trust.  The  temptation  which 
Christ  faced,  to  use  the  power,  given 
him  for  the  sake  of  the  kingdom, 
for  personal  relief,  was  fundamen- 
tally a  temptation  to  abuse  of  his 
trust.  He  was  forced  to  meet  the 
question,  Why  should  he  not  use  his 
power  for  his  own  relief —  why 
should  he  not  turn  the  stones  into 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

bread  ?  Why,  again,  should  he  not 
use  his  power  in  a  marvelous  exhi- 
bition of  trust  in  God  that  would 
remove  prejudice,  get  him  a  hearing, 
and  win  deep  and  respectful  attention 
from  the  first  ?  Why,  once  more, 
might  he  not  use  his  power  to 
establish  his  rule  —  his  own  right- 
eous rule  —  even  by  force,  forth- 
with ?  Christ's  answer  to  each  form 
of  the  temptation  is  simply  the 
insistence  that  his  power  is  given 
him  for  the  sake  of  the  kingdom, 
not  for  his  own  relief,  whether  in 
greater  personal  comfort,  in  in- 
creased popularity,  or  in  impatient 
use  of  force.  My  power,  he  seems 
with  quiet  energy  to  say,  is  no  per- 
sonal perquisite  of  my  own  ;  it  must 
be  held  sacredly  for  the  great  ends 
for  which  it  was  given. 

And  everywhere  to-day  the  same 
[164] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

temptation  presses  upon  us  all  —  the 
ever-present,  fundamental  tempta- 
tion to  the  abuse  of  our  trusts.  In 
the  use  of  the  positions  in  which  we 
have  been  placed,  of  the  power 
involved,  of  the  money  we  handle, 
of  the  opportunities  presented  —  in 
all  alike  the  power  of  this  temptation 
is  felt.  It  is  hardly  possible  to  take 
up  a  paper  without  seeing  some 
illustration  of  the  abuse  of  trust. 
Our  generation  needs  a  great  revival 
of  the  simple  sense  of  fidelity  to  our 
trusts.  No  one  of  us  is  likely  to 
cultivate  too  sensitive  a  conscience 
concerning  any  power  that  has  come 
into  his  possession.  Let  him  ask 
himself  how  his  power  has  come  ? 
for  what  end  it  was  given  ?  whether 
he  is  using  it  simply  and  solely  for 
that  end,  or  is  making  it,  rather,  a 
means  for  his  own  personal  gain  ? 
[165] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

2.  The  Temptation  to  Fall  Below 
One's  Highest  Spiritual  Sensitiveness. 
And  the  very  illustrations  which  the 
life  of  the  present  day  affords  make 
it  unmistakably  clear  that  a  large 
part  of  the  gigantic  abuse  of  trust  is 
due  to  the  simple  lack  of  a  fine  sense 
of  honor.  It  is  exactly  this  lack  that 
has  made  such  abuse  of  trust  possible. 
To  see  truly  here  and  to  take  the 
perfectly  honorable  course,  requires 
a  delicate  sensitiveness  of  conscience, 
undoubted  singleness  of  vision.  This 
was  the  only  way  of  deliverance  for 
Christ  himself.  He  needed  the 
clearest  spiritual  insight  to  see  the 
meaning  of  his  trust.  The  pathway 
both  of  the  highest  individual  prog- 
ress and  of  the  largest  social  service 
requires  that  we  should  be  steadily 
sensitive  to  the  very  best  vision  that 
God  has  given,  and  to  remain  per- 
[166] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

sistently  true  to  it,  and  so  to  get 
the  larger  and  the  higher  vision. 
All  true  life,  it  seems  not  too  much 
to  say,  is  included  in  this.  The 
inmost  secret  of  life  is  that  one 
should  be  persistently  at  his  best. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  onset  of  evil 
most  to  be  feared  is  not  that  of  open 
and  brazen  sin,  but  the  subtle,  grad- 
ual deterioration  that,  like  an  insidi- 
ous disease,  saps  the  very  foundation 
of  all  possible  character.  Like  "  the 
damnation  of  Theron  Ware,"  in 
Harold  Frederic's  powerful  story  of 
that  name,  it  comes  on  us  as  a  thief 
in  the  night,  while  we  still  think  of 
ourselves  as  sleek  and  prosperous. 
Plainly,  a  man  has  started  on  a  de- 
scent, the  extent  of  which,  in  its 
deep  darkness,  no  eye  can  foresee, 
who  consents  to  live  in  anything 
below  his  highest  spiritual  sensitive- 
[167] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

ness.  The  temptation  to  do  so  is  one 
of  those  fundamental  temptations 
which  carries  with  it  a  whole  flood 
of  others. 

3.  The  Temptation  to  Seek  Relief 
in  Change  of  Circumstances.  When 
Christ  was  tempted  to  use  the  power 
given  him  for  the  founding  of  a 
spiritual  kingdom  for  his  own  per- 
sonal relief,  whether  in  greater 
comfort,  or  popularity,  or  sway, 
he  was,  in  all  three  forms  of  the 
temptation  alike,  tempted  to  seek 
relief  in  change  of  circumstances, 
rather  than  in  change  of  self,  by 
proving  adequate  to  the  circum- 
stances. He  could  not  evade  the 
real  struggle  involved  in  the  setting 
up  of  such  a  kingdom,  and  his  vic- 
tory must  be  inner,  not  outer.  God 
means  me  to  rule,  he  might  well  say, 
yet  not  to  establish  my  personal 
[168] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

power,  but  a  spiritual  rule.  There 
is  no  escape,  for  either  Christ  or  his 
disciple,  except  by  changing  those 
inner  conditions  which  lie  within 
our  own  power. 

The  temptation  to  seek  relief  in 
change  of  circumstances  rather  than 
in  change  of  self  is  perhaps  peculiarly 
strong  for  Americans.  The  rapidity 
with  which,  in  this  newer  country, 
great  changes  of  fortune  often  take 
place,  and  the  comparative  ease  with 
which  a  change  of  employment  is 
made,  constantly  tempt  the  Ameri- 
can who  does  not  find  himself  satis- 
fied to  seek  to  change  his  conditions, 
rather  than  to  adjust  himself  to  his 
situation  and  prove  himself  superior 
to  it. 

In  any  hard  situation  there  are 
always  two  conceivable  ways  of 
deliverance  :  the  one,  that  of  simple 
[169] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

escape  from  the  circumstances ;  the 
other,  that  of  rising  superior  to  the 
circumstances.  No  man  who  means 
to  be  a  man  can  even  wish  always  to 
take  the  easy  way  out.  God's  best 
and  most  gracious  answer  to  our 
prayer  for  deliverance,  as  in  Paul's 
case,  may  often  be  not  the  removal 
of  the  "thorn  in  the  flesh,"  but  the 
"  sufficient  grace."  And  if,  in  any 
given  case,  one  finds  it  possible  to 
take  the  easy  way,  he  has  still  to 
remember  that,  so  far  as  character  or 
any  other  high  attainment  is  con- 
cerned, he  has  all  his  fight  still  to 
make.  From  that  real  battle  of  life 
he  may  find  no  respite ;  for  the  true 
sources  of  character,  of  influence, 
and  of  happiness  alike,  in  this  world 
of  ours,  are  inner,  not  outer,  —  the 
riches  of  a  cultured  mind,  the  potent 
calm  of  a  contented,  self-controlled, 
[170] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

and  lowly  spirit,  the  wealth  of  a 
genuine  love.  These  no  change  of 
circumstances  can  give.  And  they 
are  ours  all  the  more,  if  we  have  won 
them  against  the  trend  of  circum- 
stances. /  Like  Leonard,  in  Mrs. 
Ewing's  "The  Story  of  a  Short 
Life/'  we  must  learn  to  be  "  happy 
in  our  lot "  —  to  withstand  the 
temptation  to  seek  relief  in  change 
of  circumstances  rather  than  in 
change  of  self. 

4.  The  Temptation  to  Disbelief  in 
Men.  From  the  point  of  view  of 
his  work,  the  wilderness  experience 
of  Christ  involved  a  further  con- 
stant and  fundamental  temptation  — 
the  temptation  to  disbelief  in  men. 
For  all  three  forms  of  Christ's  temp- 
tation urge  the  advisability  of  begin- 
ning with  men  with  a  lower  appeal 
—  the  appeal  to  their  bodily  needs, 
[  17*  1 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

to  their  love  of  the  marvelous,  to 
their  sense  of  fear.  And  in  repudi- 
ating wholly  the  primary  claim  of 
any  of  these  lower  appeals,  Christ 
affirms  his  deep  faith  in  men.  And 
the  tempter's  argument  is  still  often 
pressed.  No  real  kingdom  of  God, 
many  of  our  modern  theories  seem 
to  affirm,  can  be  built  on  men. 
You  can  trust  no  heroic  appeal, 
no  appeal  to  love. 

Contrast,  now,  Christ's  indomi- 
table faith  in  men.  He  knows 
well  that  you  cannot  essentially 
traduce  men  without  traducing 
God.  The  suspicious  attitude  is 
one  always  at  war  with  love.  Dis- 
belief in  men,  the  cynical  spirit,  is 
fatal  alike  to  character,  to  influence, 
and  to  happiness,  —  to  character, 
for  you  cannot  greatly  love  him  in 
whose  greatness  you  have  no  real 
[172] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

belief;  to  influence,  for  you  cannot 
strongly  move  those  in  whom  your 
faith  is  small ;  to  happiness,  because 
in  this  narrowing,  belittling  judg- 
ment of  men  you  have  necessarily 
cut  yourself  off  from  the  joy  of 
worthy  association.  Suspicion  ties 
your  hands.  It  takes  the  heart  out 
of  your  work,  and  the  heart  out 
of  your  joy.  You  must  believe  in 
men. 

5.  The  Temptation  to  Distrust  of 
God.  When  one  believes  that  there 
is  no  possibility  of  using  effectively 
with  men  purely  moral  and  spiritual 
forces,  he  disbelieves  not  only  in 
men,  but  he  shows  an  even  deeper 
distrust  of  their  Creator,  God. 
This  spirit,  carried  to  its  logical 
extent,  means  nothing  short  of 
atheism  and  the  denial  of  all  ideals. 
Even  a  few  men  with  such  thorough- 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

going  distrust  of  spiritual  forces  are 
able  to  diffuse  a  deadly  atmosphere. 
The  man  who  means  with  Christ 
to  be  a  consistent  builder  of  a  spirit- 
ual kingdom  must  be  willing  to  use 
the  highest  means  and  trust  the 
results  with  God.  We  were  not 
meant  to  be  self-sufficient  even  as  to 
men  ;  still  less  as  to  God.  We  need 
men,  we  need  God ;  we  are  all  but 
fragments  else.  Life  becomes  pos- 
sible, joyful,  and  triumphant  in  pro- 
portion to  the  depth  of  our  faith  in 
God. 

And  we  all  have  a  special  right 
to  urge  with  the  young  that  they 
stand  with  Christ  from  the  begin- 
ning of  their  lives  against  these  con- 
stant and  fundamental  temptations 
that  make  a  particularly  strong  ap- 
peal to  the  inexperienced.  Christ 
seems  to  me  to  have  shared  with  us 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

all  this  sacred  story  of  his  tempta- 
tions, just  because  he  knew  that  we 
all  had  the  same  fight  to  make. 
We  can  do  nothing  better  for  men 
than  to  help  them  to  the  spirit  that 
can  rise  above  these  fundamental 
temptations ;  and  that  is  exactly 
the  spirit  of  a  true  son  of  the 
Father. 


LETTER   XII 

THE  SUPREME  CLAIMS  OF 
THE  CHRISTIAN  LIFE  UPON 
THOUGHTFUL  MEN 


Letter    Twelve 

THE  SUPREME  CLAIMS  OF 
THE  CHRISTIAN  LIFE  UPON 
THOUGHTFUL  MEN 

TN  this  last  letter  which  I  am  to 
*  write  to  you  concerning  the 
great  fundamental  Christian  truths, 
let  me  ask  you  to  see,  both  for  your- 
selves and  for  others,  in  a  kind  of 
summary  way,  and  in  the  light 
of  all  our  previous  discussion,  the 
supreme  claims  of  the  Christian  life 
upon  thoughtful  men.  You  will  not 
be  in  doubt  as  to  what  I  mean  by 
the  Christian  life.  It  is  the  life  of 
the  man  who  intends  to  be  first  and 
foremost  a  disciple  of  Jesus  Christ, 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

to  live  the  loving  life  of  a  true  child 
of  the  heavenly  Father.  And  I 
mean  by  the  thoughtful  man  the 
man  who  is  in  earnest  to  see  things 
in  their  true  proportions,  for  whom 
the  great  is  really  great,  and  for 
whom  the  little  takes  its  appropriate 
smaller  place.  You  can  hardly  find 
the  inspiration  you  most  need  for 
your  work  as  Christian  witnesses,  un- 
less you  are  thoroughly  convinced  of 
the  supremacy  of  the  claims  of  the 
life  you  are  urging  upon  others.  And 
the  lines  of  thought  already  covered 
ought  to  make  clear  to  you  how 
great  the  Christian  life  is  in  its  pres- 
ent contribution,  and  how  immeas- 
urable is  its  outlook  upon  the  future. 
Let  us  try  to  make  clear  to  ourselves, 
then,  the  supreme  claims  of  the 
Christian  life,  looking  at  the  matter 
from  different  points  of  view,  and 
[180] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

putting  it  in  different  forms,  not  all 
mutually  exclusive. 

i.  And,  first,  the  Christian  life  is 
the  supreme  prudence,  using  the  word 
not  in  any  low  sense  of  mere  pru- 
dential selfishness,  but  in  the  larger 
sense  of  that  practical  wisdom  that 
takes  the  long  look  ahead,  that  takes 
in  the  whole  of  life,  age  and  death 
and  eternity.  In  Professor  James* 
words,  "  In  all  ages  the  man  whose 
determinations  are  swayed  by  refer- 
ence to  the  most  distant  ends  has 
been  held  to  possess  the  highest  intel- 
ligence. The  tramp  who  lives  from 
hour  to  hour ;  the  Bohemian  whose 
engagements  are  from  day  to  day ; 
the  bachelor  who  builds  but  for  a 
single  life ;  the  father  who  acts  for 
another  generation  ;  the  patriot  who 
thinks  of  a  whole  community  and 
many  generations ;  and,  finally,  the 
[181] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

philosopher  and  saint  whose  cares  are 
for  humanity  and  for  eternity,  — 
these  range  themselves  in  an  un- 
broken hierarchy."  The  Christian 
life  says  with  Browning's  Rabbi : 

"  Grow  old  along  with  me ! 
The  best  is  yet  to  be, 

The  last  of  life,  for  which  the  first  was  made: 
Our  times  are  in  His  hand 
Who  saith,  '  A  whole  I  planned, 
Youth  shows  but  half;  trust  God:  see  all,  nor 
be  afraid !;  " 

The  life  of  a  disciple  of  Christ  con- 
fronts a  man,  thus,  with  the  constant 
question  :  Are  you  building  on  such 
lines  as  promise  perpetual  growth 
into  the  best  things,  even  on  into  the 
eternities  ;  or,  is  your  idea  of  life  such 
that  you  must  look  back  after  a  very 
few  years  with  vain  regret,  saying, 
with  the  title  of  a  poor  play,  "  When 
we  were  twenty  "  ?  For  myself,  I 
[182] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

do  not  see  how  it  is  possible  for  a 
man  who  really  means  to  think,  not 
to  wish  to  take  this  long  look  ahead  ; 
to  be  sure  that  he  is  building  some- 
thing better  than  greater  barns ;  that 
the  plan  of  his  life  is  so  adjusted  to 
the  great  on-working  forces  of  the 
universe,  so  bent  on  doing  the  will 
of  God,  that  it  is  certain  to  "  abide 
forever."  And  because  the  Christian 
life  takes  clearly  into  its  vision  the 
'whole  of  life  and  destiny,  it  makes  a 
supreme  claim  upon  the  thoughtful 
man. 

2.    In  the  second  place,  the  Chris- 
tian life  is  the  one  complete  life  that  can 
face  all  the  facts  of  life  without  flinch- 
ing and  with  genuine  hope.     It  should 
be  particularly  characteristic  of  the 
thoughtful  man  that  he  wishes  to  see 
all  the  facts,  to  face  them  fully,  and 
to  face  them  just  as  they  are.     There 
[  '83  1 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

is  the  fact  of  our  double  nature,  with 
both  its  heavenly  and  its  earthly  ap- 
peal. There  is  the  fateful  gift  of 
wil/,  with  its  power  of  choice  either 
for  God  or  against  God.  There  is 
the  fact  of  responsibility,  of  the  con- 
stant influence  that  we  are  exerting 
one  over  another  whether  we  will  or 
not.  There  is  the  terrible  fact  of 
sin,  an  abiding  fact,  and  if  one's  face 
is  not  in  the  right  direction,  a  grow- 
ing fact.  And  there  is  the  fact  of 
death,  the  one  certain  event  that 
awaits  every  man.  I  quite  sympa- 
thize with  the  emphasis  of  the  pres- 
ent generation  upon  right  living  as 
the  best  possible  preparation  for 
dying;  and  yet  I  cannot  think  it  a 
wholly  wise  reaction  that  allows  a 
man  to  leave  out  of  account  this  great 
and  certain  fact.  For  myself,  I  want 
to  be  sure  that  all  that  God  may  have 
[184] 


OP  THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

for  me  in  that  experience  of  death  I 
am  prepared  to  take  in. 

"  I  would  hate  that  death  bandaged  my  eyes  and 

forbore 
And  bade  me  creep  past." 

And  there  is  the  fact  of  account- 
ability to  God,  to  which  Daniel 
Webster  once  solemnly  bore  testi- 
mony that  it  was  the  most  important 
thought  that  ever  occupied  his  mind. 
"  So  then  each  one  of  us  shall  give 
account  of  himself  to  God."  And 
there  is  the  fact  of  the  future  life,  in 
which  at  least  this  is  certain,  that 
every  one  of  us  must  live  with  him- 
self. Now,  all  these  facts,  alike  dark 
and  difficult,  inspiring  and  transform- 
ing, the  Christian  life  seems  to  me 
to  be  able  fully  to  face,  as  no  other. 
It  gives  the  disciple  of  Christ  such  a 
plan  for  his  life  as  enables  him  to  be 
sure  that  the  hold  of  the  godlike  in 
[185] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

his  double  nature  shall  strengthen 
with  his  years ;  that  his  will  shall 
will  in  line  with  the  eternal  and 
righteous  purposes  of  God ;  that  he 
need  not  shrink  from  the  thought  of 
responsibility  for  others,  nor  even 
lose  hope  in  the  face  of  sin,  nor  be 
in  bondage  to  the  fear  of  death,  nor 
doubt  that  it  will  be  possible  for  him 
to  face  his  final  accountability  to 
God  in  the  same  filial  spirit  in  which 
he  faces  daily  the  Father's  will,  nor 
question  that  the  sharing  of  God's 
life  of  self-sacrificing  love  here  is 
inevitably  of  the  very  quality  of  the 
eternal  life  that  is  to  be.  How 
supreme  a  claim  does  that  life  make 
upon  the  thoughtful  man,  which  is 
able  with  assurance  and  hope  to  face 
all  these  facts  of  life  ! 

3.    The    Christian     life,   further, 
makes    a    supreme   claim  upon   the 
[186] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

thoughtful  man  because  it  involves 
the  one  great  world-organization  for 
ideal  aims,  for  ends  of  character.  The 
Church  of  Christ,  as  the  author  of 
Ecce  Homo  long  ago  pointed  out,  is 
in  very  truth  "  the  Moral  University 
of  the  world  —  not  merely  the  great- 
est, but  the  only  great  School  of 
Virtue  existing."  Have  you  thought 
what  it  really  means  for  the  ideal 
interests  of  the  world  that  there 
should  be  such  an  organization  as 
the  Church  of  Christ,  with  its  little 
groups  of  disciples,  with  whatever 
imperfections,  still  gathered  every- 
where, not  for  selfish  interests,  but 
to  bear  witness  in  the  community 
to  the  highest  ideals,  and  to  keep 
clear  before  men  the  vision  of  God 
and  the  spiritual  world  ?  There  is 
no  other  organization  or  institution, 
outside  the  family,  that  can  be  com- 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

pared  for  a  moment  with  the  Church 
in  profound  moral  significance,  and 
in  hope  for  the  world.  If  the  dy- 
namic problem  of  life  is,  as  Profes- 
sor Everett  used  to  say  at  Harvard, 
the  problem  of  throwing  one's  life 
in  with  the  great  world  movements, 
then  surely  no  man  who  wishes  to 
make  his  life  count  for  the  most  can 
wisely  stand  outside  of  some  par- 
ticipation in  the  Church  of  Christ. 
We  boast  that  our  generation  has 
come  to  see  more  clearly  than  any 
preceding,  that  we  are  members  one 
of  another.  It  would  seem  to  be  the 
first  inference  from  this  social  con- 
sciousness that  we  should  not  fail  to 
see  its  truth  for  the  highest  interests 
of  life.  We  are  members  one  of 
another,  not  only  for  economic  and 
political  ends,  but  even  more  for  the 
highest  spiritual  ends.  And  I  do  not 
[188] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

see  how  any  thoughtful  man  can  feel 
justified  in  standing  as  a  mere  on- 
looker, when  he  is  face  to  face  with 
this  one  great  world-organization  for 
ideal  aims,  the  Church  of  Christ. 

4.  Again,  the  Christian  life  stands 
for  the  mightiest  of  all  convictions,  and 
in  this,  too,  makes  a  supreme  claim 
upon  the  thoughtful  man.  A  man's 
real  strength  for  all  possible  accom- 
plishment, other  things  being  equal, 
we  are  never  to  forget,  depends  on 
his  convictions.  One  of  the  great 
dangers  of  the  educated  man,  just 
because  he  has  learned  to  look  at 
things  from  many  points  of  view,  is 
a  kind  of  over-sophistication,  that 
means  that  he  has  lost  the  sense  of 
emphasis  and  selection  among  the 
facts  of  life,  and  therefore  lost  the 
great  fundamental  convictions  that 
must  underlie  the  highest  living.  If 
[189] 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

this  has  come  to  be  true  of  a  man, 
he  is  pretty  certain  to  be  worth 
positively  less  to  the  world  after 
his  university  training  than  before. 
Now,  the  Christian  life,  in  its  very 
spirit,  stands  assuredly  for  the  mighti- 
est of  all  convictions  possible  to  men  : 
for  the  love  of  God,  and  the  life  of  love. 
In  these  great  convictions  root  all 
others  that  are  of  prime  importance 
to  men,  and  these  convictions  carry 
with  them  the  highest  courage  and 
the  most  unfaltering  faith.  No  the- 
ory of  life  that  has  ever  been  pro- 
posed to  men  is  able  here  to  outbid 
the  Christian  life. 

5.  The  Christian  life  involves,  too, 
the  supreme  and  all-Inclusive  surrender, 
and  thereby  again  makes  a  supreme 
claim  upon  every  man  who  is  willing 
to  think.  Even  our  ordinary  psy- 
chology and  ethical  philosophy  are 

[  190] 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

saying  to-day  that  life  is  a  paradox, 
that  victory  comes  through  self- 
surrender,  that  the  measure  of  life  is 
not  its  income,  but  its  outgo,  and 
that  it  is  as  one  gives  himself  in  the 
varied  relations  of  life  that  he  truly 
finds  himself.  It  belongs,  therefore, 
to  the  very  drift  of  our  times  that 
we  should  recognize  that  not  exclu- 
sion but  inclusion  enlarges  life,  and 
that  the  largest  life  can  come  only  to 
the  man  who  gives  himself  with 
increasing  breadth  and  depth  in 
family,  community,  nation,  the  king- 
dom of  God.  Now,  the  Christian 
life  brings  to  its  inevitable  climax  this 
attitude  of  surrender,  for  it  calls  for 
that  supreme  and  all-inclusive  surren- 
der that  carries  with  it  all  that  is  best 
in  all  the  lower  stages ;  for  it  is  sur- 
render to  the  will  of  God.  It  says, 
therefore,  with  Christ,  "  I  am  come 
[191] 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

down  from  heaven,  not  to  do  mine 
own  will,  but  the  will  of  him  that 
sent  me."  And  beyond  this  the  law 
of  surrender  cannot  go,  and  in  this 
one  vital  commitment  of  the  life  is 
included  all  and  more  than  all  that 
psychology  and  ethical  philosophy 
contend  for  in  the  lower  stages  of 
the  surrendered  life.  The  Christian 
life  stands  here,  therefore,  for  the 
richness  and  largeness  of  the  "abun- 
dant life,"  over  against  the  "  abiding 
alone  "  that  marks  the  life  that  re- 
fuses to  give  itself. 

6.  It  is  to  say  the  same  thing 
in  different  words,  perhaps,  when, 
catching  up  the  central  thought  of 
our  preceding  studies,  I  say  that  the 
Christian  life  makes  also  a  supreme 
claim  upon  the  thoughtful  man 
because  it  stands  for  the  relation  which 
gives  reality  and  meaning  and  value  to 


OF   THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

all  other  personal  relations.  We  have 
seen  in  detail  how  surely,  if  life  is 
the  fulfilment  of  relations,  the  rela- 
tion to  God  is  not  simply  one  relation 
among  others,  but  that  one  great, 
all-commanding  relation  which,  truly 
fulfilled,  carries  with  it  a  true  fulfil- 
ment of  every  other.  The  anxi- 
ety which  the  Christian  father,  or 
mother,  has  that  his  child  may  be- 
come a  disciple  of  Christ,  arises  from 
his  conviction  that  in  very  fact  the 
relation  to  God  is  that  one  essential 
relation  which,  itself  set  right,  in- 
evitably sets  all  others  right.  The 
thoughtful  man,  therefore,  feels  just 
at  this  point,  too,  the  supreme  claim 
upon  him  of  the  Christian  life. 

7.  Or,  if  we  look  at  the  matter 
from  a  slightly  different  point  of 
view,  we  may  say,  in  the  light  of  the 
most  careful  investigation  of  man's 


GREATNESS   AND    SIMPLICITY 

nature,  that  life  has,  above  all,  its 
great  sources  in  friendship  and  work, 
and  that  the  supreme  claim,  there- 
fore, of  the  Christian  life  upon  the 
thoughtful  man,  is  to  be  seen  pre- 
cisely in  this,  that  in  the  acquaintance 
with  God  in  the  Spirit,  it  offers  the 
one  ideal  association  for  both  character 
and  happiness,  and,  at  the  same  time, 
calls  to  the  highest  work,  the  sharing 
of  God's  own  redeeming  activity,  in 
his  giving  of  himself  to  men.  Just 
because  the  Christian  life  meets  here, 
in  the  completest  degree  in  which  it 
is  possible  for  us  to  conceive,  the 
ideal  conditions  of  the  richest  life,  it 
makes  here  a  supreme  claim  upon 
any  mind  that  is  willing  to  think 
long  enough  to  see  what  those  ideal 
conditions  are.  When  God  calls  us 
to  acquaintance  with  himself  and  to 
share  in  his  own  great  work,  he 
[  J94] 


OF  THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH 

makes  it  possible  for  us  to  give  our 
lives  to  eternal  interests  and  to  the 
highest  conceivable  interests.  Blessed 
is  the  man  who  has  found  his  work 
and  the  great  Companion  !  Heaven 
itself  has  nothing  greater  to  offer. 
We  can  hardly  doubt,  therefore,  as 
I  have  elsewhere  said,  that  "  the  two 
great  centers  of  the  life  beyond  must 
be  association  and  work ;  though  we 
may  not  know  the  precise  forms  that 
these  will  take,  nor  how  greatly  both 
may  deepen  beyond  our  present  con- 
ception. Steadily  deepening  personal 
relations,  rooted  in  the  one  absolutely 
satisfying  relation  to  God  in  Christ, 
there  must  be;  and  work,  in  which 
one  may  lose  himself  with  joy,  be- 
cause it  is  God's  work.  This,  at  least, 
the  future  will  contain." 

8.    All    this  means,  further,  that 
the  Christian  life  makes  a  supreme 


GREATNESS    AND    SIMPLICITY 

claim  upon  the  thoughtful  man  be- 
cause it  gives  assurance  of  the  highest 
hopes.  It  contains  within  itself  the 
vision  of  the  ideal,  the  best  our  hearts 
can  ask  or  imagine,  and  exceeding 
abundantly  beyond  all  that  we  ask  or 
think.  At  least  occasional  experi- 
ences in  the  personal  relations  of  life 
may  give  one  a  hint  of  the  riches 
here  in  store.  To  know  something 
of  the  deep  undercurrent  of  even  one 
true  friendship,  with  its  contribution 
of  calm  and  peace  and  hope  and  joy, 
is  to  get  a  suggestion  of  what  this 
deepening  life  in  the  acquaintance 
and  work  of  God  may  mean.  Christ 
makes  us  able  to  believe  in  the 
immortal  life,  and  in  the  endless 
growth  into  the  life  and  work  of 
love  —  into  the  deeper  acquaintance 
with  the  inexhaustible  God.  And 
we  build  our  hopes  of  all  the  future 
[  196] 


OF  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

life  upon  nothing  so  surely  as  upon 
Christ's  own  spirit  and  word.  What 
other  theory  of  life  is  able  to  give 
such  assurance  ? 

9.  And  all  these  claims  of  the 
Christian  life  upon  thinking  men 
are  true,  because,  back  of  all,  the 
Christian  life  means  simply  the  full 
recognition  of  the  one  great  'world-fact 
and  person,  Jesus  Christ.  Above  all, 
therefore,  it  is  because  the  Christian 
life  calls  to  the  discipleship  of  the 
supremest  personality  of  history ; 
because  it  brings  us  at  once  face  to 
face  with  the  vision  of  the  matchless 
riches  of  that  life;  because,  there- 
fore, it  gives  the  completest  assur- 
ance for  character  and  influence  and 
happiness,  and  so  opens  up  the  way 
to  the  boundless  growth  and  achieve- 
ment of  the  eternal  future;  —  it  is  be- 
cause of  all  this  that  beyond  doubt  it 


GREATNESS   AND   SIMPLICITY 

is  in  Christ  that  the  Christian  life 
makes  its  supreme  and  all-inclusive 
claim. 

With  this  survey  of  the  supreme 
claims  of  the  Christian  life,  and  with 
its  outlook  into  the  eternal  future, 
we  have  come  to  the  end  of  the 
conference  we  have  undertaken 
together.  I  almost  feel  as  if  I 
must  have  some  personal  acquain- 
tance with  you.  In  any  case,  I 
have  shared  with  you  my  best.  May 
I  hope  that  something  of  the  great- 
ness of  the  calling  with  which  you 
are  called  may  have  been  brought 
home  to  you  in  our  study  together 
of  these  great  themes  of  the  Christian 
life  ?  If  I  have  succeeded  in  accom- 
plishing at  all  what  I  originally  set 
out  to  do,  I  shall  have  brought  home 
to  you,  I  trust,  in  some  measure,  the 
double  conviction  both  of  the  great- 
[198] 


OF  THE  CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

ness  and  of  the  simplicity  of  the 
faith  in  Christ.  I  shall  have  helped 
you,  I  hope,  to  a  little  deeper  sense 
of  the  meaning  of  your  life  as  dis- 
ciples of  Christ,  and  of  the  joy  of 
his  service.  May  the  God  of  hope 
fill  you  with  all  joy  and  peace  in 
believing. 


[  '99  ] 


VB  22093 


M549803 


